http://elbitsystems.com/Elbitmain/files/Kinetics_NBC-CBRN.pd...
[Edit - adding this] I can also say, that this creates a very uncomfortable sensation in your ears while the cabin is being over-pressurized (about 2 minutes)
It appears the tank commander needs to guide the driver on directions, though...
I guess that's German engineering for less-than-perfect road and maintenance conditions. I like the redundancy too!
It needs to filter the air from outside and get it into the car to quickly displace the air already inside the vehicle that is contaminated.
At the point where the air is clean though it would be a good idea to make the car it's own little safe haven and allow the occupants to drive to safety (hell it could even drive itself to safety if it can sense when the air is safe again outside)
In exactly the same way that recirculating air from inside the vehicle is easier on your air-conditioner, recirculating interior air is easier on the filter.
With the A/C, you want some minimum outside air to get rid of CO2 and whatever other effluents the passengers and materials in the car are generating. But if you were driving through a plume of toxic gas/particles, you wouldn't mind smelling your armpits and a little extra CO2 if it meant extra protection from whatever is out there.
Hence I believe that if you were really designing a Bioweapon Defense Mode, you would cut the intake of outside air to an absolute minimum. You might not go for zero flow, because you might want to pressurize the cabin a bit (in the U.S., most building mechanical systems are set up this way). But I wouldn't expect to cycle through enough outside air that you could halve the concentration in that bubble (which is probably 10-20 car volumes or more) in less than 15 minutes, as their graph shows.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air-pollution-l...
A gun is created to kill. A taser to incapacitate. A knife is created to cut/stab things - and since human flesh is highly cuttable substance even kitchen knives are considered weapons. A car is created to transport people but can be used to kill. Cars are not weapons because in their conception there is no intent to harm someone.
its not like its new technology. It doesn't say how long the filter lasts, and crucially the failure mode for the filter. (will it bypass when its full? do you get a warning? etc etc etc )
Their filter does a good job cleaning particles out of the cabin air. Good on them.
Nevertheless, calling it "Bioweapon Defense Mode" is clearly a prize bit of marketing. A system designed to protect against an external bioagent wouldn't run huge amounts of outside air through the filter. That would just load the filter more quickly, impacting its performance (for chemical agents) and/or its energy requirement (for particles). Instead, you would cut the outside air intake as much as you could get away with, in order to buy the occupants time to drive clear of the plume.
Since they claim that the car is responsible for the decrease in the particle concentration in the test chamber, they must be running a pretty high flow of ambient air through the system. Of course, the ambient concentration would decrease even without the car's filter, due to particle deposition, and possibly due to losses in the sampling instrument. But then you only report those other loss rates if you're interested in science, rather than in marketing.