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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.
That's overkill. All you need to do is hermetically seal the Capitol building after all the Congresspeople are in there, and lock and bar the doors so no one breaks the seal.
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.
You know another word for that ozone released at low levels? Smog. A better title for this article would be "Smog-Sucking Tower that Doesn't Suck Smog, Just a Little Bit of Particulate...Oh, Also, it Creates Smog".
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.
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'