Curved barriers help confine traffic pollution to roads

Researchers from Imperial College London used airflow modelling techniques to study the movements of roadside particulates and develop a solution to minimise the exposure of pedestrians on adjacent paths.

Air pollution, particularly in high-density urban areas, is a growing health concern around the globe and is estimated to be responsible for around 30,000 deaths in the UK alone each year. Imperial researcher Dr Tilly Collins became acutely aware of the extent of the issue while watching her child playing netball in a school playground alongside a busy London A-road.

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“I thought to myself, what could be done? And done now?” said Dr Collins, a senior teaching fellow at Imperial’s Centre for Environmental Policy. “So, I started researching the effect of walls along roads. It became evident that along the pedestrian side of these roadside walls, there are vortices where the air quality can actually be even worse as the pollutants get trapped in them.”