Exposure to atmospheric pollution is a major concern for urban populations. Currently, no effective strategy has been adopted to tackle the problem. The paper presents the Smart Clean Air City project, a pilot experiment concerning the improvement in urban air quality. Small wet scrubber systems will be operating in a network configuration in suitable urban areas of L'Aquila city (Italy). The purpose of this work is to describe the project and show the preliminary results obtained in the characterization of two urban sites before the remediation test; the main operating principles of the wet scrubber system will be discussed, as well as the design of the mobile treatment plant for the processing of wastewater resulting from scrubber operation. Measurements of particle size distributions in the range of 0.30-25 µm took place in the two sites of interest, an urban background and a traffic area in the city of L'Aquila. The mean number concentration detected was 2.4 × 10 7 and 4.5 × 10 7 particles/m 3 , respectively. Finally, theoretical assessments, performed by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes, will show the effects of the wet scrubber operation on air pollutants under different environmental conditions and in several urban usage patterns.
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