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Redesigning and Rebuilding

A project log for Household Electrically Enhanced Wet Scrubber

A household air purification unit for kitchens, labs, & smokers used to scrub fine particulates and VOC's out of the air.

jimmy-lockeJimmy Locke 09/20/2015 at 09:190 Comments

I hit a few road blocks. I don't know how to measure performance below a 1um accuracy and I don't know how to ionize the incoming air without generating harmful Ozone. Walking around my living room with my hands in the air, my wife came to the rescue with a single sentance.

"Why not use water to ionize the air?" she said.

GENIUS! This led me to my current design. A two stage electrospray ionizing wet scrubber. Although I rebuilt the wet scrubber into a smaller form factor, I now had two wet scrubbers. I would use the first wet scrubber's liquid to charged the particulate laden air that passes through it; the particulates would be charged in a pseudo electrospray fashion. Then I would pipe the charged particulates into the second wet scrubber that is charged to an opposite polarity. Using water to ionize air would solve the Ozone problem as there would be no corona produced from the water spray. It was worth a shot! My original goal of making the whole unit smaller would have to wait, now this thing would become even more beastly! Muhahahahahahaha!

I added an aluminum rod to the inside of the smaller wet scrubber acting as a charging pole for the scrubbing liquid.

Next I simply stacked the second wet scrubber (the original prototype) on top of the smaller version and piped the output of the bottom scrubber into the inlet of the top scrubber.

The top scrubber also has the same rod on the inside to charge its scrubbing liquid to the opposite polarity of that of the scrubber below it.

I attached the clear domed lid, the vacuum motor, and the high voltage circuit.

Both wet scrubbers were filled with salt water and had opposite high voltage applied to them. Here is a video of a quick test run.

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