Tower purifies a million cubic feet of air per hour
wired.com
wired.com
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.)
> “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.
Take their money and use it to build 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.
No, seems pretty shortsighted to me not to work with developers. That kind of attitude tends to be reflective of being dogmatic (screw the rich), rather than taking a rational approach designed to maximize public value (willing to admit that it could be the case that the rich will be early adopters whose consumption benefits everyone).
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-...
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.
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.
Taking into account the long term strain on healthcare of polluted air (it makes almost everything worse), this might be an economically viable solution
Still if one is convinced that, for whatever reasons, pollution cannot be helped. This could be a good thing.
All of the green energy types (wind, electric cars) should be examined in the context of their manufacturing costs in addition to their cost to operate. (For example, smelting aluminum requires a great deal of energy.)
(For wind turbines, the energy bilance is strongly positive.)
I don't have domain experience in this field, so I can't say in this case if it's significant.
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...
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...
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?
Source: any political issue with morality stuck to it
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.
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.