To cut toxic diesel air pollutants by 85% from freight ship
Cal State Long Beach engineering students and professors are working with Rolls Royce to develop an exhaust filter expected to cut toxic diesel air pollutants by 85 percent from freight ships calling at San Pedro Bay.
With $1.8 million in grant money from the Port of Los Angeles, the pilot program seeks to create and test a device known as a seawater scrubber for large container ships and other vessels.
Engineering professors Hamid Rahai and Hamid Hefazi will lead the study with four students. The group plans to travel with the container ship Horizon Hawk on trips between Los Angeles and Oakland.
The scrubber is essentially a high-tech filter using saltwater to capture diesel particulate matter, sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides before they leave ship smokestacks. All three emissions have been linked to smog, climate change and/or illnesses including asthma, cancer and heart disease.
The filter will be installed on the Horizon Hawk, a 2,824-container ship making regular trips between California, Asia and South Pacific islands.
“This could potentially allow vessels to use (high-sulfur) bunker fuels and still reduce emissions by a tremendous level, saving shipping companies millions on the more costly low- sulfur fuels now required within 24 miles of California’s coast,” Hefazi said. “And it can be applied to both new generations of ships as well as older.”
State air quality regulators require ships traversing the coast to switch to higher quality fuels in an effort to lower levels of toxic emissions floating over communities along the coast. The 36-month project is set to begin in October.
Los Angeles and neighboring Long Beach provide millions annually to local researchers interested in helping cut emissions from the thousands of trucks, ships, trains and dockside equipment buzzing in and out of the nation’s busiest port complex daily.
Rahai said students will work on ships to evaluate the filters and emission levels during working conditions at sea.
“It exposes them to hands-on, real-life applications of what they have learned or are learning in class,” Rahai said. “Diesel exhaust is carcinogenic to humans, resulting in increased respiratory and heart illnesses. The benefits of reducing diesel emissions are improved public health.”
CSULB officials obtained a waiver from the California Air Resources Board to allow the ship to burn the more polluting fuels in the research period.
“If this works as planned, it could be applied to ships around the world, helping reduce the impact to the environment and humans produced by diesel exhaust and other pollutants,” Hefazi said.
Source: Daily Bulletin
