Generally speaking, the larger the room you have, the larger the air purifier. But is there an air purifier big enough to handle the pollutants in an entire city?
Well, the jury is still out on that, but we could know the answers sooner than later.
China has currently built a huge 100-meter air purifier in the province of Xi’an, China, to reduce the city’s smog and pollution.
And to their credit, preliminary studies and results are promising, showing that the air purifier holds great potential for improving air quality for residents.
Researchers at the Institute of Earth Environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are currently leading the research on its efficacy and functionality. And according to Cao Junji, head of the research team, the results are promising.
With that said, it’s important to note that Cao Junji also stressed that these are preliminary results.
So, there will be a lot more testing before the team gets to say whether or not the air purifier works definitively.
How Does The World’s Biggest Air Purifier Work?
So, how does this air purifier work?
There’s nothing quite like this giant air purifier in Xi’an.
To start, towering at exactly 100 meters, no other air purifier can come close to this one in terms of size. And to handle such a large area, the purifier works a bit differently than any model you can find in an office or home.
The process of cleaning the air with this air purifier starts at the air inlet. Like home air purifiers, polluted and unpurified air enters the purifier. From there, the air travels through a complex system of greenhouses at the tower’s base. These greenhouses are around the size of an entire soccer field and are solar-powered.
The greenhouses then heat the air up. This causes the air to rise through the tower, passing through a series of filters before escaping out from the top. So, the general philosophy of how air purifiers work is still present in this model, just on a much larger scale and without a fan.
The research team determining the efficacy of this air purifier is currently studying an area of 10 square kilometers in the city. And just a day after the air purifier was installed, the team reported a significant improvement in air quality in that area. In fact, on the days when pollution was severe, the air purifier was able to work and lower the pollution to moderate levels. While it wasn’t able to eliminate the pollution, bringing it down to a moderate level is a huge plus.
Another thing the designers kept in mind when making this air purifier was when they would need it the most. The Xian region experiences the most pollution during winter. This is because most residents heat their homes up, and most homes in the area are powered by coal. So, the more people use coal energy; the more pollution enters the air.
So, this air purifier is specifically designed to function during the winter months.
The entire base of the air purifier has a coating that allows it to generate power through solar radiation, even when winter comes.
And since the base is completely solar-powered, the purifier barely needs any electrical input. So, this is a very efficient air purifier as it doesn’t need any electric input during the daylight hours and only requires a little bit when there’s no more sunlight.
The research team is determining how well this air purifier can work in various conditions and situations. To do this effectively, they have numerous monitoring systems all over their 10-square-kilometer area where they take note of how the air purifier performs in certain conditions, how much of a change they’re seeing in the air quality and other relevant pieces of information.
The particles that this purifier is looking to diminish the most are PM2.5. These are the smog particles that can do the most harm and damage to humans. And during the first couple of runs of this air purifier, the result shows that the PM2.5 levels during heavy pollution dropped by around 15 percent. These are preliminary results, but they are indeed promising.
China is currently looking for different ways to reduce the pollution in their country. They have already installed a large smog tower in an art park in Beijing, and this new giant air purifier in Xian aims to produce a cost-effective and highly efficient means of improving the air quality in different areas.
On top of the preliminary findings of the research team, residents from the area admit that they are noticing a change. Like people who just bought their first home air purifier, they had said that while they didn’t really notice how poor the air quality was before they built the air purifying tower, they definitely notice it now that there’s a giant machine producing cleaner and healthier air.
Residents and researchers alike have a lot of faith in this air purifier. The results are promising, but it’s way too soon to jump to conclusions. So, for now, all we can do is wait a bit longer to see what results the research team found.