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The Smog-Sucking Tower Has Arrived in China (vice.com)
Jamie Fullerton, reporting for Motherboard:Daan Roosegaarde reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, pulled out a plastic bag filled with black powder, and waved it around. "This is Beijing smog," Roosegaarde said, before gesturing to the seven-metre tall, gently humming metal tower we are stood next to in the Chinese capital's art district, 798. "We collected it from the tower yesterday. Incredibly disgusting." Dutch designer Roosegaarde's smog souvenir may be disgusting, but it's the byproduct of an invention that he has touted as a potential alleviator of China's pollution problems. His "smog-free tower" sucks air, filters it with ion technology, with Roosegaarde having explained: "By charging the Smog Free Tower with a small positive current, an electrode will send positive ions into the air. These ions will attach themselves to fine dust particles. A negatively charged surface -- the counter electrode -- will then draw the positive ions in, together with the fine dust particles. The fine dust "is collected together with the ions and stored inside of the tower." With the dust collected, the tower then spews out cleaner air through vents, creating a "bubble" in the area surrounding it that contains, according to Roosegaarde, up to 70 percent fewer pollution particles than the pre-cleaned air.
I suggest in DC around the Capitol, they're a major source of air pollution.
So he took a factory electrostatic filter, but didn't include the scrubbers? So this is exciting how?
Much better just to install them on the factories themselves with the scrubbers....
If China uses dirty energy to produce the electricity that powers this tower, could this project end up producing more smog than it collects?
Electrostatic precipitators aren't new. While planting these all over China is nice, why not mount them on the smokestacks of the factories making the smoke in the first place?
I want to install one in the company bathroom.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You're going to die one day, so why bother with things like eating, sleeping and breathing?
Would having a large tower with a big bubble of charged ions at the top attract lightning? Because that could be cool
So you've turned the pollution into a fine powder. Now what are you going to do with it?
"Roosegaarde claims that the firm did get diamonds from pollution dust made, but as the process required so much energy it didn’t chime with the firm’s environmentally friendly ethos. Instead, they sell jewelry featuring little blocks of compressed pollutants."
Not a good answer.
"Shall we play a game?" -W.O.P.R.
So yeah, this thing is doing the opposite of what it claims. This thing produces smog.
Yes, however then the factory would be paying for it and not the government, so after getting them to buy 800 for parks and public spaces if they are received well they can start pitching government subsidies for having them installed on the smog creating smokestacks.
Anyone else read the title and think we were back to the good old days of $699 licensing fees?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So what do they do to mitigate the Ozone that's invariably produced by ionic air filtration?
This certainly isn't the first time charging air has been used as an air cleaner (anybody remember the "Ionic Breeze" ads from a decade back?)
I seem to recall Consumer Reports investigating ionic air filters and concluding they produced dangerous levels of Ozone, which is an irritant in its own right which can worsen Asthma, deaden the sense of smell, raise sensitivity to pollen, and cause permanent lung damage...
I guess I'll have to read TFA, but I suspect they're more interested in aesthetic air cleaning, not actual health improvement.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Knowing China, dump it in the ocean...
Why not put these closer to the sources of pollution? Like the smokestacks and exhaust ports from all those factories. Wouldn't that be more efficient?
But what affluent person wants to live next to that? No, better put them in the optimum locations to boost real estate values, and give the growing middle-class something to aspire to (There's a clean-air tower in your neighborhood, hmm? Well our tower is practically in our back yard!). Peasants get the factory-side views, with complimentary side of black lung, as always.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
I could see business campuses installing these on their grounds for their own personal benefit. And unlike a lot of technologies that benefit the installers locally while hurting everyone else just a little, this is a net positive to everyone. If you make them cheap and efficient, they'll start showing up by hospitals, in malls, on hotels and apartment buildings, etc, and pretty soon the air everywhere looks cleaner.
Sure, game theory would say that there's less and less benefit for future adopters as the overall air gets cleaner, but if they become a status symbol people will still install them.
I'm having trouble believing that it's nearly as effective as they say though, so it probably doesn't matter.
If enough of these are installed and can out-pace pollution even the towers just for the financially endowed will clean the air for everyone.
The air tower could be the new castle.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
If only we could stop the creation of smog in the first place.
The towers are just a silly stunt. Nobody really thinks that outdoor filters are a realistic solution. Filtering makes sense for enclosed areas, like homes and offices, but not outdoors. Beijing has been cracking down on burning trash and has banned coal for cooking/heating, and China has started imposing smog controls on cars. But diesel engines are common in China, and there are many many two-stroke gasoline engines on scooters and motorcycles. Those are not easy problems to fix. A good first step would be to promote electric scooters, with more convenient charging stations. That would not work in a hilly city like Chongqing, but should help in flat cities like Beijing or Shanghai.
One of the first things we learn in medical science is that if you are treating the symptoms, but not the cause, you have not treated the patient.
The same applies to pollution.
We need to fix the underlying source process. Band-aids will only put off the cold hard fact that you are not addressing the cause, which is the pollution caused by the use of coal and other fossil fuels.
Can you use ion scrubbers or water scrubbers on the existing plants as you replace them with other energy sources?
Sure.
But it won't deal with the cold hard explosion of coal plants.
Co-generation can cut the growth factor of those.
But they need to be replaced. Period.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Burn coal to produce electricity, creating air pollution.
Use electricity to power smog sucking tower.
Repeat indefinitely
Same principal as opening your refrigerator door to cool your house.
"That would not work in a hilly city like Chongqing, but should help in flat cities like Beijing or Shanghai"
If the scooters can regen, you'll get back most of the power on the descent.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
How about baby formula?
love is just extroverted narcissism
We've successfully turned this air pollutant into water pollutant! Now the water scrubbers can catch it and successfully turn it back into land pollutant! Later we'll burn it.
Its a standard anti pollution device on boilers and large kilns. Its something that uses a lot of electricity and the power companies will shut them off at night alot if they can get away with it.
Unless this 'technology' (which, by the way, is not anything new or innovative) is powered by raw sunlight, or Pixie dust, or Unicorn farts, or something else that doesn't require power generation, I seriously doubt that it removes more carbon and pollutants than it, overall, generates, and as such is utterly, completely useless.
So you've turned the pollution into a fine powder. Now what are you going to do with it?
"Roosegaarde claims that the firm did get diamonds from pollution dust made, but as the process required so much energy it didn’t chime with the firm’s environmentally friendly ethos. Instead, they sell jewelry featuring little blocks of compressed pollutants."
Not a good answer.
Ship it to the US as a key ingredient in blackface? Oh wait...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Don't put so much crap into the air in the first place.
Not to mention that you solve pollution issues at their most concentrated source (or as close as you can get to it). It's easier dealing with a small, contained issue than a huge, diffused one.
That is all.
At least one point is mentioned in the article: They hope that by having "bubbles" of relatively fresh air in parks, etc. for contrast, they can boost public support for more substantial smog-reducing policies.
They're not trying to clean the cities air, that would take a far larger undertaking, but to create at least limited public places where the air is clean(er). You're argument is akin to "Why use air conditioning - it only makes it hotter outside?"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Rockefeller style.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
If the scooters can regen, you'll get back most of the power on the descent.
It doesn't work that way. Electric motors are very inefficient when used in low speed / high torque situations, unless they are specifically geared for that. So most of the energy is used to heat up the coils rather than to climb the hill.
So if this thing is making Ozone is it reversing the Ozone layer damage as well?
Ah, but it's clean coal ;)
Live in Metro Manila here - characteristically poor air quality. Not as bad as Beijing. It doesn't bother me if neighbors fire up their wood or charcoal barbecue for cooking. Something useful is happening as a result. But it drives me crazy when they sweep up damp leaves and set them on fire. It is illegal and yet everyone does it.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
it drives me crazy when they sweep up damp leaves and set them on fire. It is illegal and yet everyone does it.
Obvious solution: Rodrigo Duterte could declare that it is legal to shoot anyone burning leaves. After a few extra-judicial executions, you should notice the air quality improving.
They are? Even inverter drive motors?
Complications: Some reaving reported.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Don't forget the new coal fired power plants to run the towers.
Electrostatic stack scrubbers are exactly the same thing, but fitted to the smokestacks.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Compost is a great soil amendment. The obvious solution is to setup a set of large compost piles in your front yard (one accepting, one cooking, and one being used up), let the neighbors dump leaves there. Then out-garden the lot of them until they start to keep their leaves.
They don't want to bag the leaves and throw them away. Can't blame them, PITA.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
And does that energy produce more net pollution?
They are? Even inverter drive motors?
Inverter drives are used with AC power supplies. Scooters use DC batteries and DC motors. So this doesn't even apply to the situation.
AC motors work best in fixed speed, fixed load situations, such as a fan, or a pump with a constant head. If run outside their spec, they will usually just stall (try sticking your finger in a fan, and it will just stop rather than pushing harder). An inverter can make an AC system more efficient under variable load and variable speed. But it will still be relatively inefficient if used far outside of its nominal range. If you ride an electric scooter up long and steep hills, you will soon have a hot motor and a dead battery.
This Duterte guy sounds like a Texan from the Wild Wild West. The US was built on extrajudicial executions.
**Life is too short to be serious**
It would be China's response to southern US' air conditioning. Those who can afford it can have a nicer life...and not die of a heat stroke/respiratory problems prematurely.
Ezekiel 23:20
The possible adverse effect is that it may slow down efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, of which smog have been a hugely annoying byproduct.
Not true. In fact, with AC power supplies, you go AC->DC->inverter FETs. DC->inverter FETs is less parts. You clearly were talking out your ass it seems. This would be a matter of motor design - I'm not going to say for certain if you can design a motor to give you high enough torque at low speeds and also have high efficiency at high speeds, but you probably can.
Ok, I googled for it, and it seems that the solution is more complex than just using an inverter : https://motorino.ca/technology...
The point is, it can be done. It costs more in components than the cheapest possible scooter (but it's still well within the capabilities of Chinese mass industry to manufacture) but it would give you enough power that hills wouldn't be a problem. All is required is the government gradually phase out the gasoline scooters by increasing taxes and fees, slowly ratcheting up year after year until the annual registration fees are more than cost difference to electric. Then just make them illegal.
Um, no... Congresscritters can still breathe in there. Fill it with nitrogen and they won't.
We have Armchair Generals, and now Google Engineers.
Lets google how build a warp drive together and get off this rock Mkay? You can even test it first. I will wait my turn verrrry patiently.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
The towers are just a silly stunt. Nobody really thinks that outdoor filters are a realistic solution.
Please provide some arguments.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I'm not going to say for certain if you can design a motor to give you high enough torque at low speeds and also have high efficiency at high speeds, but you probably can.
Of course you can. That is trivial. All DC motors give high torque at low speeds and high efficiency at high speeds. In fact, they give the highest torque at zero speed. That is why a Tesla can go from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds. The problem is doing the opposite: high efficiency at low speed. DC motors are terrible at that.
it would give you enough power that hills wouldn't be a problem.
Having "enough power" is NOT the problem. DC motors produce plenty of power and plenty of torque at low speeds. The problem is that at those low speeds there is little back-EMF, so the only thing impeding the current is the resistance of the coils. So the motor gets you up the hill, but when you reach the top, the coils are hot, and the battery is empty. The problem is not power, but efficiency.
Electric motors are very inefficient when used in low speed / high torque situations...
Please define "very"...
And you can not only use permanent-magnet (PM) motors that are 'specifically geared' for that, but also that are specifically designed for that.
High torque at underrated speed means high current. Add more copper, problem solved.
Explanation: Electric motors are often designed to have more or less the same electrical losses (resistance of the copper wires) as magnetical losses (due to eddy currents in the metal that guides the alternating magnetic flux). If you use thicker copper wires to reduce the electrical losses, then you can move the point where the electrical and magnetical losses are equal to a point of lower speed.
One could even argue that at lower speed the magnetical losses are considerably reduced (quadratically), lifting up the efficiency of the motor at low speeds.
The relations are a bit complex, but I'm convinced that PM motors can be designed to have comparable (and still quite good) efficiencies at low speed, high torque and at high speed, low torque.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Inverter drives are used with AC power supplies. Scooters use DC batteries and DC motors. So this doesn't even apply to the situation.
Sorry, but that is complete bogus.
The inverter that's mentioned is just doing that: converting the battery's DC into AC, and for induction motors even with the correct frequency-to-voltage ratio.
The 'stall' you mention is due to the high 'slip' (relative difference between actual and synchronous speed) which induces a high frequency current in the inductive rotor, leading to a low rotor current hence low torque.
This is a problem with AC induction machines connected to a fixed-frequency electrical grid at start-up, not at rated speed.
Stick your finger in a running fan and it might chop off your finger.
Stck your finger in a fan at stand-still and then switching it on, will prevent it from starting.
Trying to do that with a (variable-frequency) fed fan might give a different result, depending on the design of the fan's motor.
If you ride an electric scooter up long and steep hills, you will soon have a hot motor and a dead battery.
If you really meant to use the plural form, then you imply running up and down alternately, so that after a (not too long) steep hill, the battery will recharge just quite fine on the way down and be ready for the next hill. Of course the inverter will have to be designed specifically to also regenerate.
you will soon have a hot motor and a dead battery.
With a properly designed system this is also utter bogus.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I clicked on the comments to write exactly what the above poster wrote. Somebody please mod the above poster up, they have nailed it, but I have no points today.
The problem with the Philippines is that although there are a lot of laws, almost no one is enforcing them.
Or only selectively to get rid of political and business adversaries.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Because there was no proper law enforcement. Just like on the Philippines.
Duterte is a bit less evil than Obama, who extrajudicially kills people in other souvereign countries with his drones, including lots of 'collateral damage' (unnecessary innocent bystanders), whereas Duterte limits himself to killing in his own country.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Batteries are pretty good these days and you can put a lot of them on a bike. I had some students in 2000 who took the frame of a 125cc motorbike, stuck lead-acid batteries everywhere, fitted a motor and that thing could go. With the batteries of today you could get a lot more range with something that doesn't have to be very big - a Vespa sized thing is going to get you up hills.
The problem is that they include all sorts of garbage in the burning.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
It's worse than that, China will burn more coal to power the smog-recycling towers, at an efficiency level way below 1 for removing the stuff, so they'll lead to more pollution, not less.
This isn't being promoted as a serious response to air pollution. It was originally reported as being an art installation (it's in Beijing's Art district) though that may have been a ruse: it's more a piece of environmental activism. The very direct translation of air pollution to a bag of (probably carcinogenic) soot from such a tiny area illustrates the problem far better than quantitative measurements like the current reading from the US embassy in Beijing of "227".
If it was wind powered you'd probably do things mechanically instead of electrically - pump masses of air through filters instead of all the lossy steps of generating power and then an intense electric field.
Have you looked at electric bikes lately? You can buy a bike that will give pedaling assistance up to a speed of 45 km/h and has a range of 200 km. They call it 'assistance' but the electric motor provides up to 80% of the motive power. For people who really don't want to pedal, it'd be easy enough to scale this up to 100%. Electric scooters are a solved problem.
those people aren't easily replaceable. Do something about the billionaires who own our politics and you might have a point. But good luck with that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Just how much energy this sucker uses and how much pollution is caused by one of China''s coal burning power stations in generating such energy?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
But PMSM motors are better. And you can design the motor to be more efficient at low speeds. Also there's gearing, though you want to use fixed gear ratios obviously to avoid the mechanical complexity of a transmission, there's electrical gearing as an option. Even 2 parallel sets of windings in the motor, around a common shaft.
Obviously, from the perspective of motor windings, a 2 pole motor at 100 rpm is the same as a 4 pole motor at 50 rpm.
Were talking about electric motors, one of the oldest, most well understood and developed electrical components in history, known for being humanities most successful invention for efficiently converting stored non-kinetic energy into kinetic energy, so yeah it's just like building a warp drive... and derogatory naming of someone who has the initiative to actually find out the details all by themselves (entirely within anyone's grasp, because no these aren't warp drives) is nothing less than elitist. But never mind that, you carry on speculating and dismissing anyone else's insights because they don't have a shiny qualification that you recognise.
Will ionically charging the air increase the amount of ozone? Would that be good or bad?
Sounds like this - https://www.sharperimage.com/s...
I've had a few of their air purifiers for a couple of decades now. Just replaced them with new ones this year. Wonder how much a big mother city model costs.
Anything organic that can burn will decompose into compost. Anything inorganic can be screened out after composting.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The problem with electrostatic stack scrubbers is that they're not fitted to small building heating systems, which is where the majority of the smog's coming from.
China's making a concerted effort to eliminate coal-fired heating and (ultimately) wants to entirely eliminate coal burning entirely. Part of that effort is a big investment in nuclear plant and massive anmounts of R&D into safer nuclear technologies such as LFTR.
They have a double barrelled incentive to do so - the smog is one thing but if sea levels rise much, 400 million people are going to have to move. The chinese coastal plains are at risk of becoming a couple of hundred miles of swamps, lagoons and mangrove swamps.
air pollution isn't necessarily toxic chemically. You could have a charcoal briquet, which is chemically fine and perfectly safe, but if you grind it up into nanoparticles and blast it into the air it will give people heart disease and cancer. Those dangerous microparticles that are the worst part of air pollution are fine if you get them out of the air. A bag of them or liquid slurry won't hurt anyone. I bet the stuff in China's air has some acids and metals in it that are not very friendly, but again get it out of the air and you have made it far safer.
Man, you really need that seminar!