China builds world's largest air purification tower

China has built a 91-meter-tall air purification tower in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, to tackle severe air pollution. The operators of the giant tower claim it is the "world's largest air purification tower".International Business Timesyesterday news

In the winter, Xi'an residents face severe pollution, as the city's heating system relies heavily on coal. Researchers at the Institute of Earth Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences are testing an air purification tower. More than a dozen pollution monitoring stations have been set up to test the tower's effectiveness in Xi'an.

The team reports that the massive air purification tower produces more than 10 million cubic meters of clean air per day. According to Cao Junji, the project's lead scientist, air quality improved over an area of ​​10 square kilometers. "The purification tower has no peer in terms of size. The test results are quite promising," Cao said.

Cao also shared that the tower successfully reduced smog to moderate levels on days when air pollution was at its highest. The base of the tower, which covers an area half the size of a football field, includes several greenhouses. These greenhouses suck in polluted air and then heat it up with solar energy. The hot air rises and passes through several layers of cleaning filters before passing through the tower.

According to Cao, the filtration tower uses very little electricity, running mainly on solar power. "It requires almost no power during the day. The design worked very well during the test run," the researcher said.

The Xi’an tower is a scaled-down version of larger smog towers that Chinese scientists plan to build in other cities across the country in the future. A full-sized smog tower would be more than 488 meters tall and have a diameter of 198 meters, according to a 2014 patent application filed by the team.