VERTO: Elegance meets technology

Studio Symbiosis and MANN+HUMMEL have collaborated to develop an   air filtration tower called VERTO, which was inaugurated yesterday at Sunder Nursery Park, India. The first VERTO was inaugurated on the 26th of August in Sunder Nursery Park by Dr Philip Ackermann (German Ambassador to India & Bhutan).

New Delhi, 26 August 2022 – VERTO is turning around your life into a healthy and clean environment. The name VERTO means to turn. The tower turns as it rises but also it turns your life around. VERTO is an air purification tower turning polluted air into clean air.

A 360 degree multi-directional air purification system to tackle polluted ambient air. More than 99% of people living in urban areas are exposed to air quality levels that exceed the World Health Organization (WHO) limits. Air pollution has become a serious health issue across the globe.¹ As urban air quality declines, the risk of stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and chronic and acute respiratory diseases, including asthma, increases for the people who live in them.²

Studio Symbiosis in collaboration with the filtration specialist MANN+HUMMEL has developed this unique and innovative product called VERTO,  to tackle the issue of air pollution.

“Given the persistent poor air quality in India, there is a great need for robust and reliable solutions. VERTO provides a valuable contribution in this regard. It not only looks elegant, but also delivers high performance. The development of this stylish design is based on aerodynamic principles that provide maximum surface area, resulting in higher wind speeds and thus robust operation under real conditions. The tower fits beautifully into any cityscape and visually enhances its environment and acts as urban markers and sculptures”, said Britta Knobel Gupta, Founding Partner Studio Symbiosis. “We are proud that after a very successful collaboration with Studio Symbiosis, we have packaged our existing filtration technology, which is already in place around the world, into a new and extraordinary design and can now see the result in use here in India”, said Fua Nipah, President & General Manager Life Sciences & Environment of MANN+HUMMEL. “We hope that many more filtration towers will follow, providing cleaner air for people to protect our health.”

VERTO  cleans about 600000 cubic meters  of air per day, which is equivalent to an area twice the size of a cricket field with a height of 2 meters.

The filtration tower is equipped with energy-efficient fans that suck in the ambient air. The air is then filtered using fine dust filters to remove fine dust particles (PM2.5, PM10) containing pollutants from the ambient air sucked in. If nitrogen dioxide or ozone levels are also too high, so-called combination filters are used. These have a highly effective filter layer for fine dust combined with a special activated carbon layer. Due to its large inner surface area, the highly porous activated carbon is able to absorb NO2 efficiently. This specially developed combination filter medium enables a particularly high air throughput with very low energy consumption.

A control system enables the operation of the filter columns to be adjusted according to demand and thus react to the current air quality. External sensors record air and weather data, which are collected and evaluated in a cloud.

This technology has been on the market since 2018 and has been successfully implemented by German governmental institutions to tackle pollution levels on some of the most polluted traffic segments in rural areas to maintain the strict EU pollution levels.

VERTO – a joint initiative by  STUDIO SYMBIOSIS and MANN+HUMMEL envisions a clean and sustainable future with clean air for the future generations.

1.Air pollution (who.int)

2.https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2016/05/un-health-agency-warns-of-rise-in-urban-air-pollution-with-poorest-cities-most-at-risk/