Generally, an engine room of a vehicle includes an intake system that supplies fresh air to an engine, in which the intake system includes an air cleaner that filters foreign materials included in outside air introduced from the outside to make fresh air.
The air cleaner includes an air filter. The air filter having air permeability may include filter paper folded. The filter paper may be a non-woven fabric filter paper comprising of a fiber material and/or a paper air filter formed of filter paper of a paper material according to a kind of the paper filter.
Further, the air cleaner may be a lid type (or general type) or a drawer type according to a dismounting/mounting structure of the air filter. To this end, the air filter using the non-woven fabric filter paper basically includes a rubber seal for securing airtightness with a body of the air cleaner and a plastic frame to prevent its own shape from being deformed due to characteristics of the fiber material. Additionally, the air filter may be a fixing shaft non-application type air filter and a fixing shaft application type air filter according to whether to apply the fixing shaft for compression deformation of the rubber seal. Further, the air filter using filter paper includes urethane foam to secure airtightness with the body of the air cleaner while preventing the shape of the filter paper from being deformed.
Therefore, the fixing shaft non-application type air filter using the non-woven fabric filter paper and the air filter using filter paper are applied to the lid type (or general type) air cleaner and the fixing shaft application type air filter using the non-woven fabric filter paper is applied to the drawer type air cleaner.
However, the air filter using the non-woven fabric filter paper includes the rubber seal and the plastic frame or the rubber seal, the plastic frame, and the fixing shaft, such that it may have a complicated structure and may be very expensive and heavy.
On the other hand, the air filter using filter paper includes only the urethane foam, and as a result, may be advantageous in the structure, the cost, and the weight compared to the air filter using the non-woven fabric filter paper. However, when the air filter using filter paper is polluted with water or foreign materials, the air filter using filter paper may have reduced durability, and for example, when the air filter using filter paper contacts water, the air filter using filter paper may have a severely deformed shape.
In particular, the non-woven fabric applied to the air filter is manufactured by bonding with a binder and thus fibers are bonded to each other at their intersecting points, and a binder bonding type non-woven fabric may not deform a shoulder-customized shape structure. For example, “”-shaped mountains adhere to each other to prevent a ventilating resistance from being increased. However, the plastic frame may not be recycled (reused). As a result, upon the replacement of the air filter, all the parts needs to be replaced, and therefore service cost may be increased and the parts are not recycled (reused), and therefore environmental pollution may be severe due to the increase in the number of parts.
The foregoing is intended merely to aid in the understanding of the background of the present invention, and is not intended to mean that the present invention falls within the purview of the related art that is already known to those skilled in the art.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds