SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — Sometime next year, if all goes according to plan, a jet engine will be mounted atop a flatbed trailer and brought to a coal-fired plant and be mounted for a mission to clean up Delhi’s infamously polluted air.
With the engine’s exhaust nozzle facing the sky, it will be placed near a smokestack and turned on. When it roars to life, the engine will generate a nozzle speed of 900 mph, creating a powerful updraft to blast the emissions from the plant upward.
The jet exhaust will work as a “virtual chimney,” drawing in and transporting the smog, which makes Delhi’s air some of the most toxic in the world.
The project has received a stamp of approval from researchers in the U.S., Singapore and India.
“This could lead to a successful implementation of a new technology for smog mitigation all over the world,” the lead researcher, Moshe Alamaro, an aeronautical engineer and atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told BBC during an interview. “The program could use retired and commercial engines and has the possibility of adding value to numerous retired propulsion systems available,” he added.
Delhi is the most ideal selection for an experiment like this, researchers said. The capital city’s widespread use of festival fireworks, trash burning by the poor, farm waste and pollution from construction sites and cars all contribute to the thick “pea-soup” fogs. The effects become far worse during the winter — last month, schools were forced to close and construction sites were forced to stop operations after levels of PM2.5 soared to over 90 times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization and 15 times the federal government’s norms.
One of the concerns the program has drawn from the public is a pretty obvious one — the noise that will be caused by a blaring jet engine in the distance.
Alamaro said the experiment’s beginnings will be held in a remote location, far away from where it could create a disturbance. During this time, researchers will take note of the engine’s jet properties in an effort to muffle such matters. The Indian and U.S. air forces have reportedly offered retired engines for the test portion of the program.
Other opponents of the program have questioned whether any jet engine has enough power to create a sufficient enough virtual chimney, and whether expensive jet engines can be used on a large scale to control air pollution in a large city like Delhi.
