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hankwang writes:
"For the past couple of days, China's capital has been suffering under severe smog, leaving the sun and skyscrapers barely visible. The highest concentration of small airborne particles (PM2.5) was 0.50 mg per cubic meter, a factor 20 above the Word Health Organization's safe limit. Scientists went as far as comparing this to a nuclear winter. The worst seems to be over for now: today, the monitors are reading 0.180 mg/m3, only a factor 7 above the WHO limit.
The Chinese smog seems to behave differently from the smog in Europe and the US. Existing scientific models developed in the West do not work well. To improve the models and understanding, plans are underway to build a 600 cubic-meter (that's 21,000 cubic ft or 160,000 US gallon) transparent dome as a smog chamber."
[NOTE TO EDITOR: I can't get slashcode to display the mu symbol, so I converted to milligrams] [Ed's Note: Thankyou - but what is it in firkins?]
(Score: 1) by ls671 on Monday March 03 2014, @10:56AM
"I guess what I am trying to do is inject electrons into the air only to have them charge any airborne particle they encounter... once charged, the particles are attracted to ground."
That's what I understood the first time ;-)
Lets pretend your idea could work perfectly: You would have to carefully estimate the impact of those concentrated pollutants, now in a solid form, around big cities where there are more grounded structures to catch the pollutants. For example, think of the rain diluting those now solid pollutants and distributing them deep in the ground.
Right now, since the particles do not fall to the ground as fast as they would, they tend to distribute on a wider area, some going around the planet. The cities would end up with a higher concentration share than what they have right now.
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday March 04 2014, @02:25AM
Thanks. Exactly why I posted here. I am of the belief I do not have a solution to the problem; rather I can mutate one mess into another. The question is: Do I gain anything by trading mess#1 for mess#2?
And that's assuming this method will work, which I am dubious of.
HankWang has been posting some very insightful and informative replies to the technical aspects of this.
I feel for the Chinese and wish them the best with dealing with the mess. They are caught up in a socioeconomic situation where they are being led into trading off their environment for economic matters - matters that seem to make a few individuals filthy rich while leaving the rest simply filthy.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:12AM
It's a matter of doing things in order. What I suggested you to look at comes before any prototyping or any physical implementation thus, technical details about said implementation.
What I suggested you to look at could be fairly simulated with software. IMHO, this is where you should start.
Intuitively, if this is ever going to work, I feel like the positively charged ones would make it much easier to pick up and control the mess but that's just intuition.
Peace.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:11AM
Often intuition and past experience is most of what I have to go on.
I love to simulate, but all too often my models, hence anything I get from simulation, is not up to snuff.
God knows how many Spice simulations of mine have given me misleading results due to bad models.
So I often try empirical approaches to see how well reality matches my models.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by hankwang on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:38AM
The question is: which software? And then: which settings? Typically, computational fluid dynamics software has many model parameters that need to be set in order to capture the relevant physical effects for the problem at hand, without wasting processing time on effects that do not make a difference. Doing so correctly requires that you have a good grasp of the underlying physics, otherwise it will be garbage in, garbage out. Moreover, once you have this good grasp, it is likely that you can do back-of-the-envelope estimates to see whether what you want to achieve is at all plausible, or likely to be orders of magnitude off.
Part of my job is doing, outsourcing, and reviewing simulations (gas flow, diffusion, thermal, deformation, particle-gas transport, and others) for engineering purposes (not electrostatic gas filtering, though), and have seen many times that simulations produced nonsense results because the elephant in the room was missed, i.e., some dominant physical effect that was not accounted for.
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