A Prototype Filter to Clean the Automobile Exhaust

Abstract

Climate change is affecting almost all important sectors including health, agriculture, biodiversity and energy etc. and consequent extreme weather events have gained considerable scientific attention recently due to their potentially catastrophic nature. Pakistan is also affected by such extreme events e.g. floods of year 2010, 2011, 2014 and frequent heat waves. Additionally, air quality in Pakistan's major cities is worsening at higher rate. The density of transport has increased many folds and the present roads infrastructure cannot cater the need of growing automobiles flow. Consequently, frequent traffic jams, road accidents and exponential increase in air pollution levels are observed not only in the big cities but also along the major national highways. Large amount of carbon dioxide and other GHG accumulate each year in the atmosphere which contributes to the long-term trend of rising global temperature and its consequent impacts in socio-economic context. Therefore, mitigation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is dire need and major concerns across the globe. It is responsibility of all stake holders to come up with more logical and substantial solutions to deal with such issues and to create awareness among the general public. This study was designed to address the issue of CO2 mitigation. Our designed prototype device captures carbon dioxide from the exhaust before it is released in the air. The device also filters the soot particles for vehicular exhaust resulting in relatively clean air to pass through the tail pipe. Various experiments were performed in order to determine the optimum flow rate at which maximum CO2 can be absorbed by an absorbent solution. Lab grade NaOH was found the best absorbent for CO2 removal form the vehicular exhaust as compared to Ca(OH)2 and distilled water. Furthermore, efforts were made to design very simple device which is not only compatible with existing vehicular design and requires less operating and maintenance efforts but also is very cost-effective. The approach to capture the CO2 at source will prevent from the complexity and higher cost of capturing carbon dioxide directly from atmosphere.