air purification is catching on – but it may be doing more harm than good - air purifier system

Recently, I found myself in the surreal world of the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, discussing the next generation of pollution sensors you might find in your phone one day.
The exhibits I 've seen suggest that the next big thing about home technology could be from smart cat nests to the Internet --
Everything is driven by mysterious machine learning and unfathomable blockchain.
But inevitably, air quality and air purification are now a very important thing in the field of consumer goods.
Most major white appliance manufacturers have a range of products.
There's a lot to start.
Ups offers new variants-including purified robots and strange creatures wandering alone at home --
Inspired equipment that blows air on the leaves of poor unsuspecting indoor plants.
If you live in Europe, it's easy to think of these things as technology products that will never be popular, but it will be a serious misjudgment.
Expand the user base for household air filtration that already exists in Asia and beyond.
These devices are sold because people want them, and by 2023, the market value may exceed $30 billion a year.
In some ways, indoor air purification is an independent technology. In a well-
Sealed home, filter-
Based on the apparent difference in the purifier, the concentration of tiny harmful particles can be significantly reduced, especially if there is a lot of pollution in the home outdoors, such as central Beijing or Delhi.
Evidence of removal of harmful gases in the chamber, including volatile organic compounds in paint and glue, is sketchy.
Some systems let gas stick to charcoal.
But few independent data show the actual work of these filters.
In other types of purifiers, ultraviolet radiation is used to accelerate the chemical reaction of converting these gases into carbon dioxide and water.
However, the manufacturer has yet to publish data indicating that the process does not in fact end up converting relatively benign compounds into more harmful ones.
Up to now, outdoor air filtration demonstrators have proved ineffective simply because the atmosphere is very large relative to the size of the filtration system.
However, the balance has changed indoors.
The interior volume of the house is measured at a rate of several hundred to several thousand cubic meters, and only due to natural ventilation and leakage, indoor air is exchanged with outdoor air, about once an hour.
There are still a lot of cubic meters of clean air, but mathematics is beginning to accumulate.
However, the cost of filtering may be greater than it was originally presented.
Most air purifiers use cellulose or polymer membranes that are replaced about once a month, which is often part of a regular service contract.
The air is pushed through filters with fans and pumps that use energy, possibly between 100 watts (
Equivalent to a bright light bulb)
1000 watts (a microwave)
Depending on the size of the air purifier and home.
In this sense, bad air quality will affect the climate by increasing the energy needs of households and cities, and of course, it will directly increase the user's electricity bill.
The power demand for air filtration is not as big as air cooling, but it is possible to run 365 days a year, not only in summer.
If you add 500 watts of ongoing demand to millions of families, it's a big deal.
Then there were elephants in the room.
What happens with millions of microfibre particle filters or traps full of activated carbon?
I asked this question more than 20 times in Las Vegas and the answer is always the same-you put them in the bin. Should we care? Possibly, yes.
Filters that collect particles in the home eventually gather some rather unpleasant toxic chemicals collected from outside air-heavy metals generated by brake wear, multi-ring aromatic compounds produced by wood and coal fires, lists still on.
The filter may eventually remain mg (and maybe more)
Individual chemicals originally found in the air at a very diluted concentration, whose previous fate may be to deposit a very thin layer on a large area of land.
If hundreds of millions of filters from millions of households were dumped in the same city landfill, our enrichment process would double.
Do we simply transfer a question from the air to a question of the same chemicals that now penetrate into the soil and water?
It is not clear how much thought has been done about it, or if hundreds of millions of people begin to purify their air at home, what will be the consequences of energy demand. (
Think more positively: maybe those millions of garbage filters will give someone a chance to "dig" the trace metals collected? )
We can draw some obvious conclusions, the most striking of which is that there are economic opportunities in every crisis.
However, we have not been able to quantify the cost of this particular solution.
Air filtration does increase the demand for electricity, it requires raw materials and resources to build, maintain, and support, and may produce chemical treatment issues that we have not yet evaluated.
However, it does strengthen the well
The scientific principle is that stopping pollution from the source is always more effective than cleaning up afterwards.
This article was re-published from the conversation based on the creative sharing authorization.
Read the original text.
Alastair Lewis currently receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council, Defra, BEIS, Syft Technologies, and Givaudan UK Ltd for basic research on air pollution science and technology.