Environmental, health and economic benefits of using urban updraft tower to govern urban air pollution

Air quality in the Chinese urban areas has been worsened severely in the past few years and serious haze problems have been experienced frequently. Here, filter-contained urban updraft tower (FUUT) is proposed to be an approach to govern the air pollution and generate electricity. Due to buoyancy with the help of urban heat island (UHI), the air with air pollution can flow into the tower, and the air pollution mainly being particulate matters less than 10 µm in diameter (PM10) is then intercepted by the filter. FUUTs are assumed to be introduced in the typical metropolitan city in China, i.e., Beijing in 2012, and then the methods to predict the performance and estimate the health and economic benefits are established. Under these conditions, the design value of air velocity in FUUT is 5.00 m/s. The initial yearly mean PM10 concentration is 109 µg/m3, and the reduction is 6.72 µg/m3 in the first year brought by one FUUT, which contributes to the reduction in premature mortality to 227.8 and in respiratory hospital admissions to 1051.9 and the equivalent economic benefits estimated to be 211.48 million RMB yuan in total. It would take 3.45, 7.81, and 13.22 years to meet the second- and first- class China national ambient air quality standards (CNAAQS), and the standard regulated by the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline. Furthermore, the economic capability analyses of FUUT, including the levelized electricity cost (LEC) and return on investment (ROI) on different factors, are also conducted.