Inventors float new idea for cleaning Southland air.

Inventors float new idea for cleaning Southland air

If Dino Gentile and James Bartholomew have their way, blimps two football fields long will float above the Southland sucking up the smog and smoke of millions of cars and factories below, the biggest vacuum cleaners in history.

The two local inventors, undeterred by major technological and financial barriers which remain in the path of their plan, continue their lonely quest to develop the first air cleaning flying machine. Their Mobile Airborne Air Cleaning Station could give Southern California's aerospace industry a shot in the arm building the anti-pollution airships, they say.

By September, the pair plan to release analytical studies on the anti-smog zeppelins being conducted by two undergraduate engineering students at California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo.

Armed with the results, they will return to the boardrooms of Lockheed Corp., Douglas Aircraft Co. and Hughes Aircraft Co., which the duo says requested the studies in order to decide whether the craft is worth building. They hope to sell licensing rights to make the airships to one of the aerospace giants.

Reception to the idea was enthusiastic when it was presented to the industry, says Gentile, who lives in Sylmar.

"(Officials at Hughes) asked me what I thought this idea was worth. I said, |It will open up a half-a-billion-dollar industry. This is like the ATF (advanced tactical fighter).' They said, |Yeah, we understand that.' They said, |If you come back with an analytical study, we'll make an offer.'"

Officials at Hughes Aircraft were not available for comment. However, officials at Douglas Aircraft, another company Gentile contacted, said that they were not terribly impressed by the proposal.

"They came into the Douglas Co. two years ago, discussed it with a group of people and left some brochures," says Howard Kenyon, a patent agent at the commercial aircraft wing of Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach. "I looked at it and the energy requirements of it would be so tremendous, I didn't give it much more thought. It could work, but the energy requirement would be so high."

Gentile says the aircraft executives are keeping mum because they don't want to harm their negotiating positions by aiding in publicizing the notion.

Gentile said he believes 10 to 20 airships would be sufficient to service the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley, though his researchers said that their current data may be insufficient to determine the number of blimps needed.

Gentile - who says he has worked on his idea for such a craft for the better part of his 35 years and who now supports himself by selling air filtration systems - boasted of the myriad features the airships could offer.

Advertising on the sides of the ship could generate income to pay for its upkeep and operation. Solar panels could tap the sunlight for much of its energy needs. The ship could be flown to disaster sites with chemical leaks to suck up hazardous gas clouds.

The ship would work by using a collector hood to funnel polluted air into a piping system which would direct the air to different cleaning devices. The air would be cleansed of different types of pollutants and then forced out through an exhaust system.

Not technological genuises - Bartholomew, 28, has an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the University of Cincinnati, Gentile has no scientific background - the pair nonetheless is pursuing a 17-year patent on all flying aircraft which clean the air.

"We think we are pioneers in airborne air-cleaning and that we may be entitled to a patent on the whole concept - not just this particular application," says Bartholomew, a former federal patent officer who now has a Canoga Park independent practice as a patent agent.

He said government attempts to loft a reason why the pair cannot be granted the patent have been deflated. The closest invention the government has come up with so far in an effort to refute the pair's claim to a patent is an air-cleaning system which cleans helicopter interiors, he says.

Bartholomew says he is also encouraged by the fact that federal patent officials have given the project special status because it is an environmental project, a status that should expedite the project's consideration for a patent. He said he expects a final decision on the patent request by the end of the year.

Still, even the Cal Poly researchers say major obstacles remain in determining whether the crafts would be efficient in removing smog or hazardous clouds from chemical explosions.

"From my point of view, it's not the best way to solve the problem," ' said Louis Perry, the student researcher in charge of the dirigible's air pollution control system. "The best way is to clean it up at its source."

He said, however, that by scaling up existing technology the airships could potentially work. He added that with no superior, competing proposals to clean up the air that do not involve drastic changes in Angelenos' lifestyle, "I think it is an effective solution."

How much of a dent that would make in the L.A. basin's smog problem is unclear, said Perry. He said one problem is that there is not much data about what the basin's inversion layer contains.

Furthermore, the percentage of pollution in the air the blimp may float through is expected to be very low. That means extremely powerful fans would be needed to pass large volumes of air through the device's cleaning system to actually affect smog levels.

Given those problems, Gentile has shifted his marketing efforts somewhat to tout the ship's potential in combating toxic gas clouds at the sites of chemical spills and explosions.

Yet here too there are technical problems, Perry says. Escaping gas tends to sink to just above the ground - too low for the blimp to reach it - until it dissipates. In addition, the ships would require highly durable skins to prevent corrosion to the envelope which contains the ship's helium.

The ships would also be pricey - costing some $25 million to $35 million for each 600 foot ship.

Regardless of its effectiveness, the idea may be the most innovative one for taking care of the Southland's air pollution problem since former Mayor Sam Yorty half-seriously proposed installing giant fans on the mountains surrounding downtown Los Angeles in 1960s to blow the smog out of the county.

Bartholomew and Gentile are not without their backers.

"I thought his plan was very well thought out," says Chantal Toporow, a materials engineer with TRW Inc. in Los Angeles. She listened to Gentile expound his plan at the Los Angeles Eco-Expo Convention in April. "The fact that it was self-sufficient and self-contained I thought that was very good."

And even if it is not the best solution, "It may motivate others," Toporow says. "They will challenge it and people will try to better the design."

The system also won second place in the 1990 Great Idea Contest, an event sponsored by the Investors Workshop International Education Foundation.

The pair hopes that engineers at the major aerospace companies agree: "We've put everything we have into the blimp. We've put tens of thousands of dollars into it," Bartholomew says. "We're both broke right now because no one has paid us to do it."

PHOTO : Dino Gentile: Blueprints to his grand design

PHOTO : Game plan: |We think we are pioneers in airborne air-cleaning and that we may be entitled to a patent on the whole concept'