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Robert Perry: The NOx-ious Warrior
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12133 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1987 |
2,483 Words |
| Author
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Arnold B. Heller
Arnold B. Heller is a science writer based in Pleasanton,
California. |
Robert Perry's most striking childhood memories stem from the thick brown masses of choking smog that plagued his neighborhood in Whittier, near Los Angeles. The dirty air shut down schools and restricted his football practice. "I couldn't breathe when I ran. I couldn't even see up the street," he recalls.
Perry's Plants, a local nursery in nearby La Puente that was owned by his uncle and where his father was production manager, also fell victim to the smog. Employed at the nursery during high school, he watched helplessly as the pollution killed half the young bedding and flowering plants and turned many others brown during smog alerts.
Thanks to devices on cars and industrial plants, the air quality in southern California has improved, but the ravages of air pollution--including the insidious damage of acid rain--continue to plague the planet.
"Growing up in that smog made a big impact on me. I just wanted to do something to get rid of it," he says simply.
Perry finally has--in a big way. At age 35 he owns the rights to a process that could significantly reduce nitrogen oxides, commonly called NOx. These rather simple chemical compounds of oxygen and nitrogen are present in emissions from gasoline and diesel engines, coal-fired power plants and industries. NOx are major contributors to smog and are directly implicated in acid rain.
Perry's anti-NOx process, called RAPRENOx, for "rapid reduction of nitrogen oxides," removed 99 percent of NOx in tests he conducted at Sandia National Laboratories near San Francisco. The technology is startlingly simple. It involves adding to hot exhaust gases a small amount of a common chemical normally used to stabilize chlorine in swimming pools.
Perry is so convinced the RAPRENOx can markedly improve air quality that he has left Sandia and started his own company to bring the technology to market. Today, the fledgling company is besieged with business offers and requests for information from scores of manufacturers and utilities, all hard pressed to meet proposed stringent federal regulations for NOx emissions. Even stricter federal regulations are proposed beyond the ones already in place.
While catalytic converters have reduced most emissions of NOx from gas-powered cars, RAPRENOx promises the only
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