3 MIT Students Build Billboard That Can Purify Air In India

India’s education system has for long now, been known to be extremely theoretical in nature. Lacking practical exposure, a diverse faction of students have compared our scholastic set-ups to those in the United States and European Union, remarking that the instructive method adopted by Indian institutes can hardly be considered progressive.

Taking matters into his own hands, a student of Manipal Institute of Technology, Dhruv Suri, studying aeronautical engineering, invented a green billboard, with two of his classmates, Rahil Nayak and Priyanshi Somani. Hailing from Delhi, Dhruv spoke about the air pollution in his city and he observed that an air purifying mechanism was essential in most metro cities. The trio designed the prototype after reading an article about bus stops in Japan, and their dual purposes as air purifiers as well. Going with the name Carbon Dioxide Scrubber, the team worked on the prototype for 14 months until it was ready to be a working model.

Explaining the working of the prototype, Dhruv said “It looks like a normal billboard with an advertisement in the front, but inside is the purification system. On one side of the board, air is drawn in through a large fan and we use sodium hydroxide, a chemical that has the ability to absorb carbon dioxide, and clean air is then let out the other side”. A normal sized billboard of 15x21 feet would cost approximately INR 10 lakhs, as it comes fitted with solar panels, making the green billboard self-sufficient in creating energy to work the in-built air purifier. The air purifiers can also be used in an ordinary billboard, establishing ground for green billboards all across the country, by merely availing the already existing tens of thousands of boards.

Astounding the nation, the triad has corroborated that the air-purifiers follow a system of recycling. The air-purifier gathers carbon dioxide as pellets which are later on, sent to a greenhouse to be decontaminated! With this marvellous pioneering, one can hope for a reboot to sustainable and green living.