Clean cabin air with quality filters
The cabin air filter is a key component for passenger health. The UFI range offers ARGENTIUM® and HEPA filters with advanced technologies, which complement the traditional ones.
Leading filtration, thermal management and hydrogen filtration specialist, UFI Filters, is highlighting the exceptional properties of its advanced ARGENTIUM®, HEPA and other cabin air technologies to deliver purer air for both ICE and electric car passengers.
Among all the filters with which vehicles are equipped, the cabin air filter often ends up being overlooked. Wrongly, because it is not the mechanical efficiency of the vehicle that depends on it, but – even more importantly – the health of the passengers. Its function, in fact, is to improve the quality of the air that occupants breathe on board, removing dust, pollutants, pollen, allergens, bacteria and mould.
The choice of the filter to be fitted, however, is not straightforward, because the market offers many different types. A company like UFI, which has been developing filter products through a process of constant innovation for over fifty years, cannot be limited to offering the market only long-standing solutions. The experience it has accumulated in supplying original equipment, added to the activities carried out in its research and development facilities, the UFI Innovation Centres, have allowed UFI to develop six different types of high-performance filter media, known as FormulaUFI, and to ensure their in-house production.
One of these filter media is used to produce UFI Filters ARGENTIUM®, a revolutionary filter with a powerful antibacterial function. Produced with innovative FormulaUFI.Stratiflex technology, which involves a combination of three layers (antimicrobial, adsorbent and structural), ARGENTIUM® is made with a revolutionary, non-woven filter media containing Biomaster silver biocide – silver particles with a powerful antimicrobial action that is capable of inhibiting bacterial growth by up to 99%.
The combination of layers enables this superior passenger compartment filter to not only block pollen, dust (including from tyre wear and brake action) and road dirt, but also to prevent the growth of fungi and mould, and block substances such as sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX).
The structure of ARGENTIUM® also includes activated carbon, which ensures a filtration efficiency of over 98.5% for particles with a diameter of 2.5 microns, and eliminates harmful gases and unpleasant odours. ARGENTIUM® is effective against microbial growth throughout its life cycle of up to twelve months.
HEPA filters for electric vehicles
The automotive world is undergoing a profound transformation, with the transition to electric mobility requiring the adoption of advanced technologies for cabin air filtration as well. Here too, thanks to its OE experience and the research conducted in its UFI Innovation Centres, the company is ready to support the technological evolution of cars with the production of High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters – currently destined for the original equipment of battery-powered vehicles, and soon to be available to the Aftermarket too.
Manufactured with extremely high efficiency filtration media that is already used in the health and medical sectors, UFI's HEPA cabin filters achieve an efficiency of 99.975% for particles smaller than 0.3 microns: one thousand times smaller than the diameter of a hair. This means the filters trap not only atmospheric particulates and fine dust particles, but also most bio-contaminants in the air, such as spores, bacteria and viruses.