Beijing experiments with novel way to clean the air

A city air purification apparatus specializing in outdoor air cleaning will be installed in Tsinghua University, this May, to see whether it can reduce the amount of PM2.5 and PM10 particles in the air.

The apparatus, which looks just like a bus stop, is now in fact being used in Hong Kong at a bus stop at the Hopewell Centre on Queen's Road East, a bustling area, and got the PM2.5 concentration around the bus station 50-percent lower in the Causeway Bay area.

Sino Green, a section committed to community sustainable development of the leading Hong Kong property developer Sino Group, and ARUP, a globally renowned engineering design and consulting firm, developed this city air purification system and they are applying for a patent on it.

Real monitoring data show that the apparatus can reduce the amount of PM2.5 and PM10 particles in the air by more than 60 percent when the air quality is really bad and around 40 percent when air quality is relatively good, said a staff from ARUP.

Daryl Ng Win Kong, the executive director of the Sino Group, said that a similar model will be given to Tsinghua University for the test on campus, the first site to collect data. And if it works, it should be tested on Beijing streets in the future, he said.

This is part of Win Kong's proposal to develop the road air purification system and fight air pollution, at the sessions of the Beijing People's Congress and Beijing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) earlier this year.

He explained that cities like Beijing and Hong Kong, with their dense towering buildings, have trouble with their air flow which leads to the concentration of pollution. So, the cities need to develop a way to increase the air flow to change the air quality and this bus-stop-like apparatus is one attempt.

The system now operates 7:00 am to 7:00 pm and consumes 18 KWH a day, making energy consumption a concern if it is to go into larger use, but, Win Kong adds, it might operate automatically so that it could shut itself down when the air quality is acceptable. When the monitoring data are available, they will try other methods, such as solar energy and adjusting intensity to deal with the energy consumption problem.

A city air purification system developed by Sino Green and ARUP. [Photo by Wang Sujuan/China Daily]