Are you talking about the Kennedy center?

I don’t mind it. Their contributions include showing how efficient the design is (a lot more efficient than many commercial consumer air purifiers) and also popularizing the design, which the name helped a lot with. Not the particular name, but just giving it any name helps a lot with popularizing the design.

It’s not like they’re making any money off it.

I should also point out that in science it’s extremely common to name things after people who researched them, even if those things were well known long before they got that name. Especially funny is when taxonomists will name a species that already had a name known to the indigenous people of that area for literally thousands of years, and they name it after Bob the taxonomist who visited the area in the 1970s…

Haha, agree. These have been a fixture in woodshops for... quite some time. I suspect they're also used elsewhere.

Maybe their contribution was the instrumentation that showed that filters that are not rated for HEPA level filtration will still basically eliminate viral load with enough passes.

on a thing people have been making for decades…

there were no square boxes before 2020.

Corsi was Dean of Engineering at UC Davis, he should be embarrassed.

Having 4 filters in a box setup reduces the strain on the fan and allows for more airflow versus just a single filter. The larger surface area also means everything can run longer before the filters get too clogged.

The principle behind the CR design is tipping the scale towards high flow, because when doing the CADR calculation between a low flow HEPA compared to a high flow design with "lower quality" filters often the high flow design wins out. Because of the probabilistic nature of particle capture (Brownian motion and electrostatic capture), you don't need a filter with super small holes to catch super small particles. So using a filter with bigger holes it turns out nets you so much flow, that the extra air changes results in cleaner air than the more restrictive filter.

So I would guess that a single filter would be too restrictive to be as effective.

More surface area = more air flow for a given fan.

which is why wood shops have done this 40 years before 2020.

Potentially; but the more the side filters fill/clog up, the more resistance they'll create, causing more air to be drawn from the other less-resistant filters. (As long as there's actually a gap between the fan and side filters ofc)

I tried this with a single filter on a standard box fan a month ago, but it didn't have enough pressure to draw much air through a single filter; prefering to pull air through the fan itself, around the edges of the fan blades in the gap between its rotor and box frame.

A carpet blower like what op used would have much less issue with that.

There's plenty of gap around the sides of the blower and pressure equilization will help even out flow, but you're right - the flow through all four won't be perfectly balanced. That shouldn't be a big deal and I can always rotate the filters if needed.

Thanks! The fan doesn't pull a ton of current, but it seemed wasteful. Now it kicks on when it sees a human or a cat, runs for 15 minutes, and turns off.