New Delhi clears the air

Posted By Kayvan Farzaneh Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 10:43 AM Share

As the world's eyes fell on Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, Chinese authorities scrambled to find a way to improve the city's notoriously low air quality. They shut down factories, closed roads down and even tried to disperse rain clouds. Now, New Delhi is facing a similar problem prior to hosting October's Commonwealth Games. But the world's fourth most polluted city is banking on some clean tech to get it done: a giant, half million dollar air purifier. This seven-ton machine, built by an Italian company, has a five-stage filtering process and can go through 10,000 cubic meters of air every hour. P.K. Sharma, health chief of New Delhi's Municipal Council spoke with Agence France-Presse:

"It is the first such project in India and if it works then we would acquire a number of them and place them at strategic locations," the health chief of the New Delhi Municipal Council, P.K. Sharma, said.

He said a state environmental agency will monitor the performance of the machine, which costs about 25 million rupees ($551,000 dollars) and works like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in air and releasing it purified form from a roof vent."

Like in the Beijing Olympics, pollution can be a major factor for the 8,000 or so competing athletes. Three months of testing will show whether the machine actually works or not, although there are already dozens of similar models installed in Spain, Switzerland and Italy. Let's just hope it's more effective than Beijing's measures.

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SARATH GUTTIKUNDA

9:32 PM ET

March 18, 2010

Hogwashing with a Vacuum Cleaner !!

Mitigation is probably the best solution, if the goal is to reduce air pollution quickly and effectively. What Beijing did for Olympics was unorthodox, but also gave a reason to think back and realize what is the footprint of the human activities (transport and industries) that we are experiencing in the form of air pollution and related health impacts.

Air pollution is rising problem in Delhi and the sources are many – inside and outside the city. For an ordinary person, who is breathing the polluted air at any of the junctions and along the major corridors, while stuck in the congested traffic, this sounds like a miracle solution. The machine is here to suck bad air and spew out clean air, with a freshener.

Are the officials suggesting that it is OK to pollute, because we are testing an innovative vacuum cleaner to clean the air we breathe, instead of acting on the technical and policy options, which might even be cheaper and faster to implement?

10,000 cubic meters of air per hour..? The energy budget needed to reach a significant level of clean air is huge and not realistic. Air flow, even in study conditions, for a distance of 350m (the operating zone for the machine), a height of 20m (the air we breathe), and an average wind speed of 2 m/sec, translates to 350*20*2*3600= 50,400,000 cubic meters per hour !!

Of this, at a point, 10,000 cubic meters of air is purified per hour. Now, think of a city which is 30km x 30km, at least. How many of these do we need and how effective are they really going to be?

Is this a realistic solution or giving false hopes of doing something? These are good for indoors, not for outdoors.

 

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