China creates new standard for air purifier testing

China has launched its first association standard for gauging the performance of intelligent air purifiers.

The new method, released by China’s Household Electronics Appliances Institute, will sit alongside China’s existing national standard to test intelligent air purifiers, which are increasingly common in Chinese households.

Compared with the former method that uses a 12-square-meter testing chamber, the new standard employs larger rooms to reflect the actual size of homes in China, and puts more emphasis on the uniformity of performance across the room, as well as intelligent air projection instead of merely the capability of eradicating pollutants. 

Lu Jianguo, chief test engineer at the institute, said the new testing method delivered in China pushes the purification agenda forward to meet the increasing demand for better evaluation of intelligent air purifiers.

The institution has been working in conjunction with Dyson engineers, who first developed the test method on Dyson’s UK Technology Campus, where a 27-square-meter test chamber was designed to better reflect real average home sizes of Chinese consumers. 

By enlarging the size of the chamber and increasing the number of high performance sensors to nine, the effectiveness and intelligence of a purifier's automatic function can be better determined, said Tom Bennett, head of research, design, development and operations for Dyson China.