Anti-pollution car

Press, 18 March 1985, Page 19

Anti-pollution car

A Belgian inventor is trying to persuade the European Community to adopt a new anti-pollution device for cars as a way out of a row over how to fight acid rain, blamed for killing the continent’s forests, writes Peter Conradi of Reuter, from Brussels. In the next few days Henri Willot plans to start final tests on what he says is a revolutionary device that will clean up vehicle exhausts without any of the drawbacks of the only other method known to date — the catalytic converter. Willot, an engineer with years of experience in industrial air purifying projects, says his invention, a small stainless steel tube fitted between the engine and the exhaust pipe, works by splitting up poisonous exhaust gases into their harmless constituent parts, unlike the

converter which is based on a chemical reaction. In a four-stage process, lead is first separated from the other gases and fed into a reservoir; then the poisonous carbon monoxide is filtered out and sent back to the engine where it improves combustion and is turned into harmless carbon dioxide. The third element recycles uncombusted hydrogen compounds and the fourth does the same with the nitrogen oxides. “We separate the exhaust and the result is pure air and pure gas,” Willot says. The device would be cheaper to build — around $9OO in mass production — would not wear out, and could actually improve performance, as well as working on leaded or unleaded fuel, Willot claims.