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China Builds 'World's Biggest Air Purifier' That Actually Works (scmp.com)
The South China Morning Post shares an update on the status of an experimental tower in northern China, dubbed the world's biggest air purifier by its operators. According to the scientist leading the project, the tower -- which stands over 328 feet (100 meters) tall -- has brought a noticeable improvement in air quality. From the report: The head of the research, Cao Junji, said improvements in air quality had been observed over an area of 10 square kilometers (3.86 square miles) in the city over the past few months and the tower has managed to produce more than 10 million cubic meters (353 million cubic feet) of clean air a day since its launch. Cao added that on severely polluted days the tower was able to reduce smog close to moderate levels. The system works through greenhouses covering about half the size of a soccer field around the base of the tower. Polluted air is sucked into the glasshouses and heated up by solar energy. The hot air then rises through the tower and passes through multiple layers of cleaning filters. The average reduction in PM2.5 -- the fine particles in smog deemed most harmful to health -- fell 15 per cent during heavy pollution. Cao said the results were preliminary because the experiment is still ongoing. The team plans to release more detailed data in March with a full scientific assessment of the facility's overall performance.
Only three-and-a-half billion more to go!
Something seems wrong about this.
We shouldn't be purifying air, we should not be polluting in the first place.
This'll just allow people to continue polluting with natural gas to generate electricity (fastest growing fossil fuel electricity producer)
This level of both technology and organization of it is beyond the capability of probably all Western nations now.
How long would the filters last?
Essentially they have build a big fan to force the air through filters.
What are they doing with the waste products?
... but I, for one, am happy, whenever there probably seems to be a piece of good news out there.
It's certainly better news then most other things we hear, even with all the things wrong I'm sure everyone will soon have come up with.
(And I'm saying that as the official godking of calling the world shit. I was born in that mood, molded by it. We played "end of the world in four steps" as children. I didn't see good times until I was already a man.)
One of the most harmful pollutants is NOx. It's very hard to filter out, as it's a gas. How does this system deal with that?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I'm already convinced. Put this up everywhere.
Seems like the Air scrubbers out of the SimCity future technology pack
**Life is too short to be serious**
To be able to do something like this in the USA.
How many football fields is that?
How many meterball fields is that?
Who's up for some shots of methylated spirits? I separated out 15% of the methanol so it's normal, safe drinking alcohol now!
What do they do with the used filters?
China Builds 'World's Biggest Air Purifier' That Actually Works
Whenever I see stuff like this, I always have questions:
No firing 10mm explosive tip caseless under the primary heat exchangers, right?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Oh come on. You made that shit up. What a crock.
10 million cubic meters spread over 10 square kilometers is (10 million m^3) / (10 km^2) = 1 meter. So over such a wide area, this thing is only cleaning a 1 meter thick layer of air.
Should be taken a step further and used to extract CO2 out of the atmosphere and using solar power make ethanol out of it. We can burn it or put it in the ground.
Climate scientists should be talking about fixes like this instead of shaming the general public who canâ(TM)t do much about it anyway.
So to have significant effect, such a system would need to be installed on many flat-topped buildings in urban areas, or open ground. If you're going to do that, why not install solar power generators in the same places, which reduce need for dirty power generation? The system is de facto using clean power generation potential for air filtering, albeit in efficient manner (due to direct utilization of solar thermal energy), but I question it's total utility value. China is already pushing electric cars etc heavily so that source is not a long term problem.
I would supposition that plant based air cleaning systems, whethe normal plants like http://mashable.com/2017/02/09... or moss like https://futurism.com/4-citytre... can be installed even more places, even filling vertical walls, effect not dependent on large single areas to support 'chimney' etc, and actively clean the air in even more ways, as well as adding oxygen.
Although on the other hand, the chimney filter system can very well be applied where heat chimneys already inherently serve climate control cooling function for buildings, and designing buildings with this approach in mind reduces need for air conditioning etc thus reducing electric consumption.
Why not use water or some other method that won't need constant filter replacement and create junk. The water could be reused until it evaporates away and leaves solid waste material. You could even use the water to cool something as it does it's job.
China has proposed to make 15 million people with handheld fans to blow smog away .
While this may not be called 'build', it must world's biggest air purifier.
http://shanghaiist.com/2017/11...
Yeah. China is annihilating efficiently the desert dust by removing the desert and replacing it with Industry.
aaaaaaa
> but when the wind blows out of the West
That does not happen very often. Maybe 1 day a week on average. Sometimes during winter it can be two weeks or more before that particular wind pattern emerges.
Beijing is in a natural bowl and thus (like Los Angeles and Tehran), suffers hugely from air pollution that just builds up because of which way the wind is blowing.
Thats not true at all. China's coal power stations are the most efficient in the world. US coal plants wouldn't pass the regulations to be allowed to run in China.
Maybe you need to update your knowledge.
You may want to look here http://www.powermag.com/first-u-s-ultrasupercritical-power-plant-in-operation/
Turk may be unique in the U.S., but it is just one of dozens of new ultrasupercritical pulverized coal plants that have cropped up in recent years around the world. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA’s) December 2012–released “Technology Roadmap: High-Efficiency, Low-Emissions Coal-Fired Power Generation” report finds that in 2011, about 50% of new coal-fired power plants used mostly supercritical and ultrasupercritical coal units, a share that doubled in the past decade. Ultrasupercritical plants are already operational in Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany, and China (Figure 2). China is notably spearheading the ultrasupercritical revolution: As of 2011, it had 116 GW of 600-MWe ultrasupercritical units and 39 GW of 1,000-MWe ultrasupercritical units in operation out of a total coal-fired fleet of 734 GW. (See also “China Leads the Global Race to Cleaner Coal” in our December 2012 issue.)
And that was half a decade ago...
Scientists do all kinds of different experiments and I'm glad they did this and it's operational. However, I think it obvious that since the government has such tight control, they are swiftly implementing actions to go after the sources in the manner that won't kill the economy. What I don't get is that just creating the jobs to put the additional filters on coal plants is beneficial so things like that should be happening as intermediate steps. I was shocked the other day when I saw the article how they already have an entire fleet of electric buses for a city. The rate at which they can change far exceeds our own. We barely think about things and debate them for years with great struggle while they just make things happen. Another thing I can't wrap my head around is what the house prices in Beijing are going to be 20 years from now when it's a completely clean air city.
So, we invest millions on tearing down old smog producing chimneys to spend millions putting up new smog reducing chimneys....