‘World’s Biggest’ Air Purifier In China Is 330 Feet Tall

In a bid to fight off the charts level of smog, China has constructed an experimental air purifying tower said to be the biggest of its kind in the world, reports said.

According to a report by South China Morning Post, the 100-meter (328 feet) high tower in Xian, the capital of the northwestern province of Shaanxi, is reported to be having a positive effect on the air quality in the area.

The tower is still at an experimental stage, and is being subjected to numerous tests by researchers of the Institute of Earth Environment from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Research head Cao Junji said that the quality of air was recorded to be better after observations were made over a distance of 10 square kilometers (3.86 square miles) in the past few months.

Cao also said that the installation of the tower resulted in more than 10 million cubic meters (353 million cubic feet) of clean air per day since it was launched in 2017.

He also added that on days when the smog reached critical levels in the city, the purifying tower brought the level down to a moderate stage.

The purifying system consists of the tower along with greenhouses at the base of the tower, covering an area approximately half the size of a soccer field. The polluted air is pulled inside the greenhouses and heated via solar energy. The hot air then rises into the tower, where it passes through multiple layers of cleaning filters.

The city of Xian is expected to face a polluted winter due the city’s reliance on coal for heating purposes.

With regards to the size of the tower and its performance, Cao said, “The tower has no peer in terms of size…the results are quite encouraging .”

However, Cao also stated that the results were preliminary in nature as tests were still ongoing. More elaborate details are expected to be announced by the research team in March, after assessing the tower’s overall performance.

The construction of the Xian smog tower was launched by the academy in 2015. The construction of the facility finished in 2017 at a development zone in the Chang’an district, the report stated. The motive behind the construction of the tower was to discover an efficient and low cost strategy to artificially remove polluting particles from the air. The cost of the project, however, was not announced.

Cao said, “It barely requires any power input throughout daylight hours. The idea has worked very well in the test run.”

China's battle with rising smog levels has been a tough one.

According to a report by South China Morning Post on Monday, smog levels in the northern province of Shaanxi went way above hazardous levels despite an announcement made by the Ministry of Environmental Protection last week, claiming it had made meaningful progress in reducing smog levels in the region.

The report stated that by Monday noon the air quality index for Lifen, a city in the province, went up to 428 as per recordings made by the China National Environmental Monitoring Centre.

Smog levels beyond 300 are said to be dangerous while 500 is the maximum level, the report said.