Pluvo: A pollution solution that pays

Industrial Design Student 2016

Nick Hooton and Lewis Hornby
Royal College of Art / Imperial College London
Innovation Design Engineering

Urban air pollution Pluvo was invented to tackle the deadly and illegal levels of pollution in cities, now the biggest killer in the world, thought to kill 5.5 million people every year. In London the air quality is twice the legal limit set by the World Health Organisation, and contributes to 10,000 premature deaths every year. Nationwide, pollution related health effects cost the NHS £20 billion annually. Despite efforts to reduce the amount of pollution emitted into the atmosphere, levels are set to double by 2050. A distributed network of Pluvo purifiers will clean the air in the most polluted and populated areas.

Purification Rainfall is very effective in naturally cleansing the air. Water droplets attract, collide and combine with pollutants to remove them from the atmosphere. Pluvo enhances this natural process by creating a mist of water droplets of varying sizes to capture effectively the wide range of pollution types in cities. Attaching pollutants to larger bodies before filtering means that the system is to able clean air considerably more efficiently than traditional methods. Pluvo responds to local changes in pollution levels by optimising the mist in realtime to increase efficacy. The water is recycled around the system meaning that it can be situated anywhere within reach of a power supply, such as lampposts, unused telephone boxes and new electric vehicle charging points.

Advertising Current approaches to purifying city air are not scalable as they lack commercial incentives. Pluvo’s purifying mist provides an engaging medium for high value advertising. They can be used as a standalone advertising unit or grouped together to create a truly immersive experience. For maximum impact Pluvos will be placed in pollution hot-spots, where traffic also drives high advertising revenue.