THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 7, 1995 TAG: 9504070540
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
You're in the heart of Los Angeles on a miserably smoggy day and decide to do your bit to clean up the air. So you take a drive on the freeway.
Outlandish as it may seem, the latest idea in the battle to chip away at air pollution is to turn cars into roving air purifiers, devouring any smog that crosses their paths.
This is no visionary fantasy; it is taken dead-seriously by a variety of experts.
``It's not a wacky idea,'' said John H. Seinfeld, chairman of the division of engineering and applied sciences at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. ``It's something worth looking into.''
So what's up? Engelhard Corp., an Iselin, N.J., company that in the mid-1970s developed catalytic converters for cars, has now developed a catalyst that would reduce pollution in a whole new way.
The company has specialized for years in automotive catalysts, the under-car canisters that scrub the exhaust, converting carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides into harmless carbon dioxide and water. Hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides, if emitted freely, can be cooked by the summer sun into ground-level ozone, or smog - poisonous molecules consisting of three oxygen atoms.
Now Engelhard is trying to persuade federal regulators and car makers to add a new catalyst, one that breaks ozone down into a molecule of two oxygen atoms, which is what we breathe. The catalyst works at ordinary summer temperatures or on a warm surface, and the idea is to paint automobile radiators and air conditioner compressors so that a car purifies the air that runs under its hood.
``In Los Angeles they drive 266 million miles a day,'' said William Rosenberg, a former assistant administrator for air at the Environmental Protection Agency whose air-pollution consulting company is working with Engelhard. ``That's a lot of air you could process.''
Outside experts agree that the idea has promise. ``It presents us with a great opportunity, beyond zero-emission vehicles,'' said Mary D. Nichols, the EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation, referring to the electric cars soon to be mandated in California. ``We can move into negative-emission vehicles.''
The idea is in its early stages. At $500 to $1,000 a car, Engelhard said, it would be cheaper than other air-cleaning schemes, especially in California, which in its effort to reduce polluting emissions has clamped down on everything from factories to house paint and deodorant.
Engelhard said that the fundamental difference between this and other systems is that the car does not purify its own exhaust; instead it destroys a pollutant in the atmosphere, using nothing but the catalyst and waste radiator heat. It also converts carbon monoxide, a toxic gas produced by incomplete combustion, into carbon dioxide. by CNB