Mitigating air problems and producing renewable energy with solar downdraft tower

Abstract

Over the past three decades, China, especially in the megacity areas, has suffered from air pollution and heavy haze with its decades-long burst of economic growth and rapidly expanding clout as an industrial giant. The important two elements of air pollutant in China are the fine particles (PM 2.5-PM 10) and non-natural greenhouse gases. To overcome these problems, in this study, we propose a novel inversion solar chimney approach for mitigating the air pollution and haze problems in the megacities of China by using water to scavenge air pollution through spraying water into the atmosphere. For a water drop floating in air or falling through air, the sensible heat of air would transfer to the latent heat of droplets and will cause a decrease in drop size. In a quite short transient time, the droplet evaporates and cools down to air ‘wet-bulb’ temperature. The Direct air capture devices (DAC) are installed at the bottom of the solar downdraft tower to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere.