> “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.
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.
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?
> 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.)
> 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.
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.
Or the increased demand will make them cheaper to produce and the consumption will justify further investment into making them better.
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).
You can buy something with equivalent throughput and functionality for $5000 off Amazon (16 * 1000CFM filters). There's no way these will make smog not a problem for the rich outside of closed, indoor environments.
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.
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.
I don't think there exists a coal plant in the developed world that isn't already using this technology. Without these particulate filters, a wide swath of area around each coal plant would be entirely uninhabitable by modern standards.
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.
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
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.
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.
... which was manufactured using energy from a coal-burning electrical plant :-)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.