Posted on 10/03/2016 6:08:34 AM PDT by tekrat
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.”
(Excerpt) Read more at motherboard.vice.com ...
First rule of getting out of a hole - stop digging.
They wouldn’t need to pull the gunk out of the air if it wasn’t put there in the first place.
The real irony is that the ion tower is probably going to be powered by a coal power plant.
This might work for particulates, but I doubt it would do anything for other types of air pollution like ozone. It kind of reminds me of the old idea in Southern California of digging tunnels in the mountains and building giant fans to blow the smog out over the Pacific Ocean.
Most of the air pollution in China, and really most of Industrial Asia, is particulate. If they can find a legitimate powersource, this might be a viable short-term solution.
I think it’s likely that smog everywhere is mostly particulate matter. However, ozone is present as part of the air quality problem in a China. I’m sure they’re are other non-particulate issues as well.
Life is just ducky in commie China. Harpy should put on her Mao suit and tell us how wunnnerful it will be.
I just spent a week in China.... it is not Communist really. More capitalist in some respects than the US, quite frankly. There is a lot of government control though, probably more out in the open than here, but I would suspect to the same degree. The main difference I see is in Housing. Totally different system, and not well run. Also the pollution is no worse than say, Houston or LA. The main problems really are due to the lack of good road systems in the cities and way too many vehicles for the roads they have. Like they grew up too fast.
Given the number of lives there and our relationship with China, that’s good to hear. If freedom and capitalism is the hand on the rudder, I hope they keep pushing is hard to the right.
But it’s very probably powered by COAL.
So, he’s actually ADDING smog to the area.
***“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.”***
Just like a precipitator in a power plant removes fly ash. Wonder how they will collect and dispose of the smog particles.
China probably won’t go for it. The bosses there figure they already have over a billion self-powered, self-repairing (to a certain degree) mobile smog filters in operation all over the country.
This is unlike the US where every person is equal before the law and the written constitution is followed to the letter. Wait a minute...
Exactly
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