The Smog-Sucking Tower Has Arrived in China (vice.com) 166
Jamie Fullerton, reporting for Motherboard: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." With the dust collected, the tower then spews out cleaner air through vents, creating a "bubble" in the area surrounding it that contains, according to Roosegaarde, up to 70 percent fewer pollution particles than the pre-cleaned air.
We need one in America. (Score:1)
I suggest in DC around the Capitol, they're a major source of air pollution.
Re:We need one in America. (Score:5, Funny)
That's overkill. All you need to do is hermetically seal the Capitol building after all the Congresspeople are in there, and lock and bar the doors so no one breaks the seal.
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The smoke from the fire caused by all the trapped hot air will be a short term environmental expense that will pay itself off over time in the form of reduced pollution and reduced global warming.
Make sure the chains on the doors are of good quality and cinched tight!
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No, you gotta Nuke it from orbit, that's the only way to be sure...
You act as if (Score:2)
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No, that would be bad. The Capitol is a historically significant building, and creating a vacuum in it could very well cause it to collapse.
Filling it with nitrogen or some other inert gas should be OK though.
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Throw in a generous amount of 'dry ice', close doors and windows, wait.
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Nitrogen IS an inert gas, for most things. No, it's not a noble gas, and it's not completely inert, but it composes almost 80% of our atmosphere, so for any place which is designed for exposure to our atmosphere, it's pretty close to inert. It's inert to biological lifeforms (it causes no damage, though it lacks both oxygen and CO2 so respiration doesn't work), and for everything else it's pretty much inert compared to the oxygen which causes oxidation reactions (like rust). It's used in car tires these
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Um, no... Congresscritters can still breathe in there. Fill it with nitrogen and they won't.
uhm, these are standard on most factories (Score:1, Insightful)
So he took a factory electrostatic filter, but didn't include the scrubbers? So this is exciting how?
Much better just to install them on the factories themselves with the scrubbers....
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Not all the Smog is coming from Factories. A lot of it is homeless burning trash to keep warm and a lot of the dust is from construction. This allows people to do something to improve things locally without having to wait to change entire societies' behaviour. Is it efficient ? No. Does it Work ? Maybe. In theory Communism is a lot more efficient than Capitalism but in practice Capitalism works because people are basically selfish. So we should not always hold out for the most efficient solution.
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Scrubbers are for the NOx and SOx while precipitators are for dust, smoke etc.
If they were standard, or also fitted on vehicles, there would not be such an air pollution problem.
What you see there is a "libertarian" set of rules about pollution. Until you put something in milk that obviously is killing kids it's fair game.
Net Negative (Score:3, Interesting)
If China uses dirty energy to produce the electricity that powers this tower, could this project end up producing more smog than it collects?
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Not to mention this sounds like those ionic breeze "filters" from the early 2000s. I tried one and had to return it because the ozone it produced was causing more problems for me than the dust it was eliminating.
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Not to mention Sharper Image lost court cases about fraudulent claims.
http://www.latimes.com/health/... [latimes.com]
Re:Net Negative (Score:5, Insightful)
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Smog is not ozone
Smog is the dirty air hovering over cities which also contains ozone
Actually, most regulatory agencies consider smog to be the result of sunlight+NOx+VOCs creating ozone or NOx and/or SOx +H2O making acid rain, so in a since ozone is Smog. These ionic-breeze-on-steriods towers will of course create some ozone (because some of the O2 in the air will get ionized and generate some affinity to create O3 in addition to some more indirect paths with N2 and CO2).
Much of the high dust/dirt particulate part of the air (aka dirty air), isn't generally considered smog except perhaps f
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Did your cat turn white?
And moved the office into a volcano lair.
Ionic Breeze Quadra Mark 2? (Score:1)
Electrostatic precipitators aren't new. While planting these all over China is nice, why not mount them on the smokestacks of the factories making the smoke in the first place?
Re:Ionic Breeze Quadra Mark 2? (Score:4, Insightful)
why not mount them on the smokestacks of the factories making the smoke in the first place?
Because then Chinese made iPhones and Androids would cost a more money, so you and everyone else would buy the ones from India or Vietnam or Africa or some other third world hellhole instead. You are the reason not to mount them on the smokestacks.
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You are the reason not to mount them on the smokestacks.
No, he's not the reason. Globalists pushing endlessly for free trade (i.e. rich people) are the reason.
Not that long ago, nearly all computers and computer-related peripherals were made in USA. For example my IBM model M clicky keyboard says "MADE IN USA" and the date is 1991. This was before Clinton gave China most-favored trading nation status and stuff were still being made here because corporations couldn't just move all their factories to any "third world hellhole" (as you put it) any time they wanted.
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Except that those trade deals were sold to the electorate as "good for consumers" and consumers voted twice for it; with their democratic votes and their wallets.
No, it's you. It's me. It's every swinging dick reading this. Some of us are honest with ourselves. Others delude themselves and put the blame on the targets they've been trained to hate.
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Ross Perot
You forgot Buchanan. And Bernie.
There were choices. There were voices making the case. None of them we're rewarded by the electorate. They were all shouted down with "TrAd3 WaRz!!1" by the left and the right and the voters were pleased. Trump will be another entry on the list.
The truth is the Left and professional class workers in the US want it this way. They like padding the regulatory nest at home and keeping all that industry out of the environment. Wiping out the livelihoods of the Deplorabl
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Re: Ionic Breeze Quadra Mark 2? (Score:3)
http://articles.latimes.com/19... [latimes.com]
And Bush Jr. followed in Daddy's footsteps by making China's MFN status permanent:
https://georgewbush-whitehouse... [archives.gov]
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Congress was the one who gave the most favorite nation status each year until Clinton. Clinton changed it so that the State Department was the entity who issued MFN status.
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You didn't bother to click on the first link to the archived 1990 article (before Clinton was elected) did you?
You don't get to rewrite history to fit your agenda.
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Not revisionist history, honest. I would've happily written "Bush" instead of "Clinton" had I known that Clinton was not the first president to give China MFN status. In fact, I would've preferred writing "Bush" because it would've gotten my point across better.
(any time I say anything negative about Clinton, liberals start foaming at the mouth and all rational discussion ceases)
Bush and Clinton do pretty much the same things, for the most part. Both take money from corporations and do their bidding. Differ
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The Clintons are corrupt and malicious, the Bushes misguided.
Are you sure?
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice just as sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.
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You'd also have to mount one on the tailpipe of every car and truck in Beijing.
Bathroom (Score:4, Insightful)
I want to install one in the company bathroom.
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Then the bag would contain fertilizer!
attract lightning? (Score:2)
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... So a positively charged tower would make a better tesla coil than lightning rod. (In the Red Alert 2 sense...)
Where do I order my 7 meter high Tesla coil? I think I want one on my lawn. Fer duckhuntin'...
About that "plastic bag filled with black powder" (Score:2)
"Roosegaarde claims that the firm did get diamonds from pollution dust made, but as the process required so much energy it didn’t chime with the firm’s environmentally friendly ethos. Instead, they sell jewelry featuring little blocks of compressed pollutants."
Not a good answer.
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We've successfully turned this air pollutant into water pollutant! Now the water scrubbers can catch it and successfully turn it back into land pollutant! Later we'll burn it.
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So you've turned the pollution into a fine powder. Now what are you going to do with it?
"Roosegaarde claims that the firm did get diamonds from pollution dust made, but as the process required so much energy it didn’t chime with the firm’s environmentally friendly ethos. Instead, they sell jewelry featuring little blocks of compressed pollutants."
Not a good answer.
Ship it to the US as a key ingredient in blackface? Oh wait...
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Smog producing (Score:3)
So yeah, this thing is doing the opposite of what it claims. This thing produces smog.
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If you were forced to choose, smog (ozone/acid-rain) generally isn't as bad for your lungs as particulate matter (combustion ash which contains all sorts of industrial chemicals). Assuming this works as advertised as all...
Of course "clean" air would be better...
Anyone else (Score:2)
Anyone else read the title and think we were back to the good old days of $699 licensing fees?
Ionized Air & Ozone (Score:5, Insightful)
So what do they do to mitigate the Ozone that's invariably produced by ionic air filtration?
This certainly isn't the first time charging air has been used as an air cleaner (anybody remember the "Ionic Breeze" ads from a decade back?)
I seem to recall Consumer Reports investigating ionic air filters [consumerreports.org] and concluding they produced dangerous levels of Ozone, which is an irritant in its own right which can worsen Asthma, deaden the sense of smell, raise sensitivity to pollen, and cause permanent lung damage...
I guess I'll have to read TFA, but I suspect they're more interested in aesthetic air cleaning, not actual health improvement.
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Maybe if they make the towers really tall it would pass the ozone up where it's needed
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Yes, people argue they might produce some extra Theragen gas, but I'm sure we can deploy Theragen gas-sucking towers once that becomes a problem.
Symptoms not Cause (Score:2)
One of the first things we learn in medical science is that if you are treating the symptoms, but not the cause, you have not treated the patient.
The same applies to pollution.
We need to fix the underlying source process. Band-aids will only put off the cold hard fact that you are not addressing the cause, which is the pollution caused by the use of coal and other fossil fuels.
Can you use ion scrubbers or water scrubbers on the existing plants as you replace them with other energy sources?
Sure.
But it won't
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See, this is the problem with you Yes/No people.
Look, it's fairly easy to cut your carbon emissions in half, without radical change. You're just to lazy to accept change.
For example, the future is presented as: We Must All Ride Bikes.
But, to cut carbon emissions from cars in half, it's fairly easy. In a typical family, have one plug-in electric car, charged from green solar/wind/hydro, used for commuting. And have a combo of bike plus transit for the kids. This way, fewer fat kids, you save tons of money,
It's an infinite circle (Score:2)
Burn coal to produce electricity, creating air pollution.
Use electricity to power smog sucking tower.
Repeat indefinitely
Same principal as opening your refrigerator door to cool your house.
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Same principal as opening your refrigerator door to cool your house.
Except, that doing that will actually make your house warmer over time.
Its called a precipitator. (Score:4, Informative)
Its a standard anti pollution device on boilers and large kilns. Its something that uses a lot of electricity and the power companies will shut them off at night alot if they can get away with it. [google.com]
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and the power companies will shut them off at night alot if they can get away with it.
You can thank your regulators for that. The power company's main purpose is to produce power for the lowest possible price. Doing a community service by making their output cleaner than required doesn't really come into it. Another good one is furnaces with sootblowing lances. Most sootblowing is only allowed to take place at night. Also refineries with flaring systems. The flame is typically allowed to burn as long as you like, just don't generate any smoke during the day. If you start smoking the response
Carbon footprint? Likely positive. (Score:1)
Easier solution... (Score:2)
Don't put so much crap into the air in the first place.
Not to mention that you solve pollution issues at their most concentrated source (or as close as you can get to it). It's easier dealing with a small, contained issue than a huge, diffused one.
Use the useless by-product for something- (Score:3)
Rockefeller style.
Ozone Layer (Score:2)
How much energy does it consume? (Score:2)
And does that energy produce more net pollution?
Adverse effect (Score:2)
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You're going to die one day, so why bother with things like eating, sleeping and breathing?
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Complications: Some reaving reported.
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I could see business campuses installing these on their grounds for their own personal benefit. And unlike a lot of technologies that benefit the installers locally while hurting everyone else just a little, this is a net positive to everyone. If you make them cheap and efficient, they'll start showing up by hospitals, in malls, on hotels and apartment buildings, etc, and pretty soon the air everywhere looks cleaner.
Sure, game theory would say that there's less and less benefit for future adopters as the
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If enough of these are installed and can out-pace pollution even the towers just for the financially endowed will clean the air for everyone.
The air tower could be the new castle.
Re:If only we could stop the creation of smog... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget the new coal fired power plants to run the towers.
Electrostatic stack scrubbers are exactly the same thing, but fitted to the smokestacks.
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The problem with electrostatic stack scrubbers is that they're not fitted to small building heating systems, which is where the majority of the smog's coming from.
China's making a concerted effort to eliminate coal-fired heating and (ultimately) wants to entirely eliminate coal burning entirely. Part of that effort is a big investment in nuclear plant and massive anmounts of R&D into safer nuclear technologies such as LFTR.
They have a double barrelled incentive to do so - the smog is one thing but if se
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Re:If only we could stop the creation of smog... (Score:5, Informative)
If only we could stop the creation of smog in the first place.
The towers are just a silly stunt. Nobody really thinks that outdoor filters are a realistic solution. Filtering makes sense for enclosed areas, like homes and offices, but not outdoors. Beijing has been cracking down on burning trash and has banned coal for cooking/heating, and China has started imposing smog controls on cars. But diesel engines are common in China, and there are many many two-stroke gasoline engines on scooters and motorcycles. Those are not easy problems to fix. A good first step would be to promote electric scooters, with more convenient charging stations. That would not work in a hilly city like Chongqing, but should help in flat cities like Beijing or Shanghai.
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"That would not work in a hilly city like Chongqing, but should help in flat cities like Beijing or Shanghai"
If the scooters can regen, you'll get back most of the power on the descent.
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If the scooters can regen, you'll get back most of the power on the descent.
It doesn't work that way. Electric motors are very inefficient when used in low speed / high torque situations, unless they are specifically geared for that. So most of the energy is used to heat up the coils rather than to climb the hill.
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They are? Even inverter drive motors?
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They are? Even inverter drive motors?
Inverter drives are used with AC power supplies. Scooters use DC batteries and DC motors. So this doesn't even apply to the situation.
AC motors work best in fixed speed, fixed load situations, such as a fan, or a pump with a constant head. If run outside their spec, they will usually just stall (try sticking your finger in a fan, and it will just stop rather than pushing harder). An inverter can make an AC system more efficient under variable load and variable speed. But it will still be relatively ine
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Not true. In fact, with AC power supplies, you go AC->DC->inverter FETs. DC->inverter FETs is less parts. You clearly were talking out your ass it seems. This would be a matter of motor design - I'm not going to say for certain if you can design a motor to give you high enough torque at low speeds and also have high efficiency at high speeds, but you probably can.
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I'm not going to say for certain if you can design a motor to give you high enough torque at low speeds and also have high efficiency at high speeds, but you probably can.
Of course you can. That is trivial. All DC motors give high torque at low speeds and high efficiency at high speeds. In fact, they give the highest torque at zero speed. That is why a Tesla can go from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds. The problem is doing the opposite: high efficiency at low speed. DC motors are terrible at that.
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But PMSM motors are better. And you can design the motor to be more efficient at low speeds. Also there's gearing, though you want to use fixed gear ratios obviously to avoid the mechanical complexity of a transmission, there's electrical gearing as an option. Even 2 parallel sets of windings in the motor, around a common shaft.
Obviously, from the perspective of motor windings, a 2 pole motor at 100 rpm is the same as a 4 pole motor at 50 rpm.
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Ok, I googled for it, and it seems that the solution is more complex than just using an inverter : https://motorino.ca/technology... [motorino.ca]
The point is, it can be done. It costs more in components than the cheapest possible scooter (but it's still well within the capabilities of Chinese mass industry to manufacture) but it would give you enough power that hills wouldn't be a problem. All is required is the government gradually phase out the gasoline scooters by increasing taxes and fees, slowly ratcheting up yea
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We have Armchair Generals, and now Google Engineers.
Lets google how build a warp drive together and get off this rock Mkay? You can even test it first. I will wait my turn verrrry patiently.
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it would give you enough power that hills wouldn't be a problem.
Having "enough power" is NOT the problem. DC motors produce plenty of power and plenty of torque at low speeds. The problem is that at those low speeds there is little back-EMF, so the only thing impeding the current is the resistance of the coils. So the motor gets you up the hill, but when you reach the top, the coils are hot, and the battery is empty. The problem is not power, but efficiency.
Re:If only we could stop the creation of smog... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Inverter drives are used with AC power supplies. Scooters use DC batteries and DC motors. So this doesn't even apply to the situation.
Sorry, but that is complete bogus.
The inverter that's mentioned is just doing that: converting the battery's DC into AC, and for induction motors even with the correct frequency-to-voltage ratio.
The 'stall' you mention is due to the high 'slip' (relative difference between actual and synchronous speed) which induces a high frequency current in the inductive rotor, leading to a low rotor current hence low torque.
This is a problem with AC induction machines connected to a fixed-frequency electrical grid at
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Electric motors are very inefficient when used in low speed / high torque situations...
Please define "very"...
And you can not only use permanent-magnet (PM) motors that are 'specifically geared' for that, but also that are specifically designed for that.
High torque at underrated speed means high current. Add more copper, problem solved.
Explanation: Electric motors are often designed to have more or less the same electrical losses (resistance of the copper wires) as magnetical losses (due to eddy currents in the metal that guides the alternating magnetic flux). If you use thicker copper wir
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it drives me crazy when they sweep up damp leaves and set them on fire. It is illegal and yet everyone does it.
Obvious solution: Rodrigo Duterte could declare that it is legal to shoot anyone burning leaves. After a few extra-judicial executions, you should notice the air quality improving.
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This Duterte guy sounds like a Texan from the Wild Wild West. The US was built on extrajudicial executions.
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Duterte is a bit less evil than Obama, who extrajudicially kills people in other souvereign countries with his drones, including lots of 'collateral damage' (unnecessary innocent bystanders), whereas Duterte limits himself to killing in his own country.
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Compost is a great soil amendment. The obvious solution is to setup a set of large compost piles in your front yard (one accepting, one cooking, and one being used up), let the neighbors dump leaves there. Then out-garden the lot of them until they start to keep their leaves.
They don't want to bag the leaves and throw them away. Can't blame them, PITA.
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Anything organic that can burn will decompose into compost. Anything inorganic can be screened out after composting.
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Or only selectively to get rid of political and business adversaries.
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The towers are just a silly stunt. Nobody really thinks that outdoor filters are a realistic solution.
Please provide some arguments.
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Have you looked at electric bikes lately? You can buy a bike that will give pedaling assistance up to a speed of 45 km/h and has a range of 200 km. They call it 'assistance' but the electric motor provides up to 80% of the motive power. For people who really don't want to pedal, it'd be easy enough to scale this up to 100%. Electric scooters are a solved problem.
Re:If only we could stop the creation of smog... (Score:4, Insightful)
At least one point is mentioned in the article: They hope that by having "bubbles" of relatively fresh air in parks, etc. for contrast, they can boost public support for more substantial smog-reducing policies.
They're not trying to clean the cities air, that would take a far larger undertaking, but to create at least limited public places where the air is clean(er). You're argument is akin to "Why use air conditioning - it only makes it hotter outside?"
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Electrostatic stack scrubbers, fucking genius can't be bothered to learn the first thing before commenting. Are you in middle school?
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Yes, however then the factory would be paying for it and not the government, so after getting them to buy 800 for parks and public spaces if they are received well they can start pitching government subsidies for having them installed on the smog creating smokestacks.
Re:Effort Better Spent on Industrial Scrubbers (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not put these closer to the sources of pollution? Like the smokestacks and exhaust ports from all those factories. Wouldn't that be more efficient?
But what affluent person wants to live next to that? No, better put them in the optimum locations to boost real estate values, and give the growing middle-class something to aspire to (There's a clean-air tower in your neighborhood, hmm? Well our tower is practically in our back yard!). Peasants get the factory-side views, with complimentary side of black lung, as always.
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