MUAC is an urban solution to improve the air and environmental comfort of cities
Modules for cleaning urban air
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What is muac?
Nature can absorb and purify the air pollution that we generate. However, we have adapted nature to our cities, making it grow in dry and paved environments, where its roots are not exposed to the open air and where the soil, rich in microorganisms that nourish and care for our plants, in most of the cases, has been banished from our streets.We have been able to reproduce the natural ecosystem of plants and convert it into highly efficient air biofilters. Each biofilter is a container with soil rich in microorganisms where plants grow. The ground and plants are constantly humid.
When the polluted air passes through the interior of these biofilters, the soil and the roots (the rhizosphere) encapsulate the contamination and gradually assimilate it. The end result is a cool breeze that softens and humidifies the temperature around you.
Modules for Urban Air Cleaning
MUAC
The idea for this product was born in 2017 when our founder CEO conducted a research stay at the Tianjin Institute of Meteorology in China.
During his stay, he experienced first-hand what it is like to live in a place with a perennial haze, where the sun was blurred in the sky due to significant air pollution, and where every household in this city had two or three home air purifiers.
In collaboration with another Chinese researcher, during the last stage of his research stay. He developed and patented a plant module prototype with a forced aspiration system to capture and purify the air.
In 2018 already in Madrid, a research group was integrated at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, and thanks to the funding received from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) in its Climate KIC call, the first minimum viable product was made:
“A nature-based air purification tower for urban environments”
This project had the support of many private companies that contributed to validating the product:
- Altair helped to simulate by numerical calculation the airflow through the tower.
- ITEVELESA allowed standardized sensors to conduct real-time absorption tests of polluting gases such as CO – Carbon Monoxide, CO2 – PM – Carbon Dioxide, Particles in suspension, and hydrocarbons.
- CentralAuto lent its calibrated measuring equipment for NO-NO2 – Nitrogen Dioxide and Monoxide, CO – Carbon Monoxide, CO2 – Carbon Dioxide, and O2 – Oxygen, with which we tested, in a controlled environment, the efficiency of the system to absorb and purify these contaminants.
Product development
BENEFITS OF THE SYSTEM
The tests carried out showed that the vegetated panels had a significant direct absorption capacity (more than 80% of carbon monoxide and fuel emissions were contained) as well as the capability to absorb and assimilate NOx (a combination of NO and NO2 – Monoxide and Nitrogen Dioxide) a difficult-to-degrade gas originated by the combustion of vehicles and very present in our cities.
- Multiply vegetation by 8x for each square meter of occupied area (two 0.5 m2 towers make up 8 m2 of vegetation).
- Democratize access to vegetation in neighborhoods with highly paved surfaces.
- Contribute to generating microclimates in urban heat islands, softening temperatures, and increasing relative humidity.
- Create green corridors by contributing to restoring the pollination cycles of plants.
- Easy installation and maintenance. They only need a water point and a concrete surface to be placed (their modular structure allows them to be installed in a few hours), and their maintenance is limited to pruning every two months.
- Autonomous operating system (they have a photovoltaic panel and a large capacity battery to keep the forced ventilation system on).
- They can support other IoT services such as nodes to measure air quality, tourist information points, charging points for personal electric mobility (bikes and scooters), and WiFi repeaters, among other services.
You are one step away from improving your quality of life
We enhance the absorption capacity of nature for polluted air through an autonomous urban element (it only requires connecting it to a water point and installing it on a rigid concrete surface) that contributes to multiplying up to 8 m2 of vegetation, each square meter that it occupies in the surface. With these elements, we can create green corridors or corridors and improve people’s quality of life, besides their physical and mental health.