A team of Dutch designers & engineers at Studio Roosegaarde have a new concept to clean the air of polluted cities – bicycle mounted smog vacuums. Oddly enough there is actual science to back this up, and it looks like it will really happen. The project takes the real research of Professor Bert Blocken of the Eindhoven University of Technology and reimagines a broader, mobile application. Blocken developed the ‘positive ionization ENS technology’ which essentially sucks a large amount of the particulate matter out of polluted air, and Daan Roosegaarde has already used the tech to create the Smog Free Tower project, a real working prototype in China that employs a fixed tower in an urban green space to separate the smog from the polluted air of its immediate surroundings. Now Roosegaarde wants to take the tech on the road…
Now that both the underlying technology and the Smog Free Tower itself have been successfully evaluated with both measurement in the field and the backing computer simulations, results confirm that the tower captures and removes up to 70% of the ingested PM10 (particles less than 10 microns in diameter) and up to 50% of the ingested PM2.5 (<2.5 microns) particulates from its surroundings.
For the tower in an open field, and calm wind conditions, that means it can result in PM10 reductions up to 45% and PM2.5 reductions up to 25% over an area radiating out 20m (65′) around the tower. Its benefits are said to be even more effective when constrained to a more enclosed area.
So now Roosegaarde is looking to take the Smog Free Project to the next step with the Smog Free Bicycle. The innovative bike would essentially get a small portable version of the tower that would inhale the polluted air of more confined city streets, cleans it, and spit out clean air onto the bike rider.
The project is currently in its first development stage, but hopes to become a viable method to combat smog in the urban environment, while reinforcing the ideas & benefits of cycling as a more healthy form of urban transportation to start with. Roosegaarde hopes see his concept align with the fast growing attention being paid to bike share systems in China, and feels that the smog capturing system could be a good fit for such programs like the more than one million sharable bikes in the Beijing region’s Mobike program. “Beijing used to be an iconic bicycle city. We want to bring back the bicycle as a cultural icon of China and as the next step towards smog free cities”, says Daan Roosegaarde.
