Tower purifies a million cubic feet of air per hour

http://www.wired.com/2015/09/tower-purifies-million-cubic-feet-air-hour/?mbid=social_fb

by anigbrowl • 11 years ago

87 44 11 years ago

a radial ventilation system at the top of the tower (powered by wind energy) draws in dirty air
“We’ve gotten a lot of requests from property developers who want to place it in a few filthy rich neighborhoods of course, and I tend to say no to these right now,” he says. “I think that it should be in a public space.”

So there's enough wind available to power this device, but not enough to make cleaning the air a public benefit unless the device is located in a public square or park. That seems like a contradiction. Then there are the other benefits of getting a new product into the hands of early adopters: getting feedback, process and volume improvements that cut costs (and price), market awareness, and that little thing called staying in business long enough to matter. This guy's cutting off his pollution-cutting nose to spite his oh-so-socially-conscious face. Not too bright.

ars• 11 years ago

It's quite shortsighted to refuse to work with the developers.

Take their money and use it to build more for the public.

thaumasiotes• 11 years ago

But, if rich people are seen using these, nobody else will want one. ;)

molmalo• 11 years ago

At first, I thought that. Why wouldn't they just take their money and use it to subsidize more for the public?

But then, I thought that maybe, they are thinking something like this: If smog is not a problem anymore for the rich, because of these devices, there would be less incentive to stop producing it, and go green.

I thinks that it's something similar to public school or public health. If the rich have access to private alternatives, their concerns about the quality of the public offering is reduced. In this case, if they are not the ones breathing smoggy air, their concern about air pollution (in poorer zones) is significantly reduced.

MichaelGG3• 11 years ago

I find it highly unlikely they'd make much impact outdoors. 1 million cubic feet/hour is 16,666CFM. Wikipedia says a Manhattan city block is 264 by 900 feet. So even if we assume 10' ceiling (so 2.3M CuFt) and little airflow, we'd still need several of these towers to clean it. Except outdoors are higher than 10 feet, and even light wind (avg in NY is 9MPH) will replace the air several times an hour.

More realistic are small filters like this one[1] where you have a relatively limited semi-enclosed space the air flows around. So perhaps in, say, small pavilions and seating areas in a park or something, it might be slightly useful if the surrounding area is rather polluted. But sticking a few in a "filthy rich neighborhood" isn't gonna accomplish much (apart from making money or making people feel smug).

Maybe on a city-scale, using real industrial-strength devices all over would work. But one would assume that cities with smog issues must have already looked at filtering systems and there must be some serious limitation or they'd be deployed already.

1: https://www.techinasia.com/outdoor-air-purifier-wait-bus-40-...

zo1• 11 years ago

But if we're moving on to "industrial-strength devices" on a "city-scale", then we might as well mandate their installation near the producers of the unclean air that we're trying to clean.

I.e. Make an industrial-strength version of this, and stick it on say a coal power plant's cooling tower. I'd imagine you'd get far more bang for your buck due to the efficiency gains of not having to "clean" almost-clean air.

arghbleargh• 11 years ago

When this kind of device is being used outside, does it actually have a noticeable impact on the air quality? Purifying enough air to fill Madison Square Garden sounds impressive, but it's nothing compared to the volume of air that cycles through the atmosphere.

tadfisher• 11 years ago

Not only that, but will the net effect be positive if this device is powered by, say, a coal-burning electrical plant?

jashephe• 11 years ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted; this seems like a totally legitimate concern. Depending on the efficiency, you might end up just moving the pollution to a different location.

the8472• 11 years ago

The article states it's powered by wind power.

Roadgazer• 11 years ago

This type of devices can be potentially used in the areas with poor ventilation, like in between the mountains. Poor ventilation (lack of the winds) leads to the situation when all smog stays there, and just smog from the cars is enough to create breathing problems. Years before, at some European resorts, buses were forbidden due to this reason, only electrical trolleys allowed.

rincebrain• 11 years ago

Here's a promotional video from the building opening that I saw before this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IWaSHJCE80

I got curious what sort of airflow would result around this building with the numbers stated, and the possible ramifications of it.

1M cubic feet per hour sounds much more impressive than ~278 cubic feet per second, particularly across the entire surface area of the building.

Let's say it's 5.75ft to a side and square-ish, since it yields a building that's got a perimeter of 23 feet, and ignore the roof, since that's intake - you're pushing ~278 cubic feet per second through 529 square feet of surface area, so you're displacing about half a foot of air per second over the entire surface, or a gentle breeze when you're right up against the building surface, let alone any distance away.

(I'm aware the building is finned, not flat, and that this is just sketchy math. I just thought I'd share it because it gives interesting insight into what this could feel like right next to it.)

Animats• 11 years ago

It's an electrostatic precipitator, which will pull solids out of the air. Those have been around for a long time; Honeywell sells them as furnace filters, they were a staple of Sharper Image catalogs, and every decent coal plant has a huge one pulling fly ash out of flue gases.[1]

Any large precipitator needs a way to get the solids off the plates and into a collection bin. Home precipitators typically lacked that; the user had to take out some component and wash it off regularly. Industrial-sized ones have "rappers" which bang on the collector plates to knock the dirt off. How does this thing do that?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdRk3op2zpE

ihsw• 11 years ago

Seems to imply that it's a manual process:

She adds that there are concerns around efficacy and logistics like how often something like this would need to be cleaned. But Ursem himself has used the same technique in hospital purification systems, parking garages, and along roadsides.

nathancahill• 11 years ago

As a rule of thumb, whenever a "big" number is used in a headline, it is usually a much smaller than amount than it sounds.

I don't have domain experience in this field, so I can't say in this case if it's significant.

MichaelGG3• 11 years ago

So true! Give us some comparisons as to what these large numbers actually mean. Otherwise it's just jabbering.

Well, a good PC case fan does 160 CFM. A $200 Honeywell air purifier can do 300CFM. So a million cubic feet/hour (16,666CFM) is 55 of these little purifiers.

Furthermore, it's recommended that air be changed a few times per hour, even for residential use[1]. MSG is 10,800,000 cubic feet, so you'd want over 30 of these towers to keep the air lightly clean in there.

Amazon has an eletrostatic purifier that does 1000CFM, so 1/16th of this tower, for $330.[2] 30-1/4 by 24 by 12 inches, so probably still doable in the same volume as the tower.

But this tower looks a lot cooler, making it worth an article I guess.

1: http://www.berriman-usa.com/sizing_table_air_cleaners.htm 2: http://www.amazon.com/708620B-AFS-1000B-Filtration-Electrost...

dTal• 11 years ago

Feynman had a useful tip - whenever you hear an "impressive" number, try adding a zero. Ask yourself if you would have felt differently about the statistic with the larger number.

x5n1• 11 years ago

I wonder if Chinese people are watching this. I could see China produce and install thousands of these all over the place in probably less than a year.

Frqy3• 11 years ago

It looks like Daan is already on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcH0TAdR8FE

eldude2• 11 years ago

Hypothetically, when pollution removal becomes a logistical issue, how will it affect technological progress?

Forget present biases, how does society change when waste pollution becomes merely a business cost?

What technological achievements are presently limited by the morality of environmental destruction?

emp_zealoth• 11 years ago

Putting morality into solutions doesn't work.

Source: any political issue with morality stuck to it

trevelyan• 11 years ago

Thou shalt not kill....

drdeca• 11 years ago

I don't really understand what you mean by that.

eldude2• 11 years ago

What a ridiculously useless and distracting comment stemming from ignorance on the origins of morality. Even secular morality originates from some manner of cultural common good.

In this case, I'm obviously alluding to the morality associated with environmentalism, which acts as an umbrella for why anyone cares about the destruction of an external resource: self-interest.

jahnu• 11 years ago

Build your own!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5YFK8mmeRQ

http://rimstar.org/science_electronics_projects/electrostati...

angusb• 11 years ago

This really doesn't seem like a lot. 1m cubic feet is a 30x30x30m cube. In one day it processes 24 of those. Even if there was no such thing as wind or diffusion and you only needed to treat the 30m of air next to the ground, this "neighbourhood" would only be 150m long and 150m wide for it to be cleaned in a day (as they claim).

TBH I don't rally like Wired's reporting on this kind of stuff. To get an overall view of whether this is useful or not, we need to know:

- lifetime of the pollutant

- air changes per day

- whether this type of pollutant is an important one to tackle

...without that we can't know whether this is just an art project or something practically useful.

akiselev4• 11 years ago

Even 100 x 100 meters is a decently sized city block and that's pretty good depending on how much they cost. Considering it took California decades to clean up Los Angeles air using new technology and regulations, Im pretty sure Beijing residents wouldn't have a problem seeing a pretty, oversized Porta potty every 50 meters if it meant clean air.

Taking into account the long term strain on healthcare of polluted air (it makes almost everything worse), this might be an economically viable solution

benihana• 11 years ago

So what happens to the particulates after they're collected? Is this a matter of "let's take these molecules and use them somewhere", or is it like we have a shit-ton of solid waste full of sulfur and hydrogen and we have to bury it?

akiselev4• 11 years ago

We're talking about air pollutants which are mostly industrial waste and exhaust so they're practically useless and have to be stored.

Since this pollution is already in our air regardless, it doesn't really matter how we store it as long as it's not in our lungs.

SCHiM2• 11 years ago

“We’ve gotten a lot of requests from property developers who want to place it in a few filthy rich neighborhoods of course, and I tend to say no to these right now,” he says. “I think that it should be in a public space.”

I love the idea if it's really as healthy and good as the article makes it appear. But it immediately saddens me to see such a short-sighted attitude.

Why not sell it to the 'filthy rich' and then with that money build some more in public spaces? In the end you have more air purifying towers than if you only built them in public parks. Not to mention that, obviously, air moves around. So it doesn't much matter where you put the things.

akiselev4• 11 years ago

This. Hell, you'd probably sell a lot more by jacking up the price to 10x the cost of production/distribution instead of 3x and donating several purifiers to deserving communities for each one sold to the filthy rich.

On the other hand, this looks less like a common appliance purchase and more like a $10-20 thousand piece of capital equipment, so all bets are off.

wisty• 11 years ago

I'd imagine it's more time constrains - maybe he's still doing bespoke work. Also, Beijing and Mumbai could be quite valuable clients.

ck2• 11 years ago

I thought ionizers were bad because they make ozone.

amelius• 11 years ago

I've got a better solution. All engine exhaust pipes should end in the cabine of vehicle. That will make car-owners spend money on filters, instead of letting the environment take the burden.

h1fra• 11 years ago

Like it's said in the article, it's not a solution but something that "hide" the real issue.

You can be against nuclear power, it has huge drawback in the long term, but it has a lot of effect in the short/mid term. Hopefully we'll find a way to recycle nuclear waste or a more cleaner energy.

But in the meantime I don't see any advantage to search for a way to clean air while we still producing lot of pollution...

Tower purifies a million cubic feet of air per hour

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