Challenges to incorporate cabin air quality enhancer in mobility solutions

In the past five years, Indian cities have been consistently appearing in the list of top 15 world’s most polluted cities. A common man in India, daily spend more than 2 hours on the road during commute to work, thus exposed to inhale highly polluted air. In case of passenger car users, he/she is exposed to ~ 6 times more polluted air compared to ambient air – as vehicle cabin is a closed space where the air recirculates through air conditioning (AC). Prolonged exposure to such polluted air shows increasing trend in respiratory illnesses, breathing discomfort and fatigue. This paper discusses about the key challenges involved in incorporating cabin air quality enhancer (cabin air filters) in mobility solution. Engineering challenges are packaging of cabin air filters in current vehicle cabin and its validation through objective assessment and subjective assessment by trained evaluator. The objective assessment comprises of bench tests and subjective assessment requires trained expert noses, hence it is a business of high development expense. Ultimately, this development cost will be borne by customer through initial cost and running cost as well, its second challenge in addition to earlier. In present scenario, cabin air filters are horizontally deployed from eastern market to Indian usage which gets clogged in short time and fail on efficiency and effectiveness front. This paper discusses aspects to be considered during incorporating cabin air filter in present mobility solution. It also covers learning from typical cabin air filter development for India usage, which will serve above discussed challenges