One of most potential avenues for improving the air quality is new technology development. We’ve come up with a slew of innovations to keep the air we breathe clean, from emissions controls to everyday household items.
For this occasion, we’re going to cover six innovations that really are actively avoiding air pollutants from affecting our environment and health. Regulatory and market-based approaches to reducing air pollution have each had their own advantages and disadvantages, as we’ve previously noted. Individual innovations will be discussed instead of looking at technology as a whole because new innovations don’t typically have the same cost-benefit ratio as other approaches.
Devices For Tracking Multiple Pollutants
Monitoring of air quality, particularly for many pollutants, is a favourite topic of ours.
An air pollution management system is incomplete without this piece of equipment, even if it does not directly cut emissions and remove air pollutants from the atmosphere. Some pollution control devices, such as those found in factories and power plants, are capable of reducing emissions of more than a pollutant. Monitoring for many pollutants at the same time saves time and money for government agencies tasked with enforcing emission restrictions on a wide range of contaminants.
Carbon Dioxide Catalytic Reduction
One of the world’s leading causes of air pollution is the exhaust from automobiles. Cars equipped without catalytic converters, which accelerate the redox reaction that turns deadly harmful emissions into less damaging pollutants, were introduced in the 1970s in response to stricter environmental restrictions.
Snarl Of Vehicles
The most common type of catalytic converter found in modern gasoline-powered automobiles is the oxidation-reduction three-way converter. Carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide are converted to carbon dioxide or nitrogen sources dioxide by exposing exhaust to catalysts, which lower the activation energy required for chemical reactions. Catalytic converters are excellent tools for lowering the health and the environment implications of automobile exhaust since carbon dioxide or atmospheric nitrogen are significantly less toxic than oxides of nitrogen dioxide, notwithstanding CO2 being a GHG.
However, there are several drawbacks to using catalytic converters. For starters, these devices can reduce fuel efficiency or vehicle performance by restricting the flow of exhaust. During the warm-up stage of the catalytic converter, the vehicle generates uncontrolled amounts of pollution. Some of these converters require gold or palladium, precious metals that pollute throughout the refining process, in order to function.
Smokestack
Wet scrubbers & dry scrubbers will be the main topics of discussion. It is possible to utilise a wet scrubber with varying levels of energy to remove particles or gasses from a flow of air. Spray towers are a common low-energy wet scrubber that distribute liquid by moving exhaust through with an open vessel equipped with sprayers. For example, when exhaust runs through an exhaust device, it picks up particles that float by or consumes the target gas. Similar to liquid scrubbers, dry scrubbers spray dry chemicals into in the flue stream to neutralise gases before they are released into the environment.
Because they keep polluting harmful emissions from harming populations near industrial hubs like power plants and water systems, scrubbers are an extremely useful instrument for pollution control. Furthermore, because they don’t interfere with production, these gadgets allow business and industry to proceed as usual without experiencing an increase in air pollution.
Substitutes for hydrofluorocarbons (CFC) or Hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC)
To prevent further destruction of the ozone layer, the Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987, mandated the gradual phaseout of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) or hydrofluorocarbons (HCFCs). Alternatives that served the same purpose but had a far lesser impact on the ozone layer were needed since CFCs and HCFCs were so widely utilised as solvent, propellants, and refrigerants (ODP).