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An electricity-free oxygen concentrator

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Resnick:
Has anyone seen this project? http://freo2.org/siphon/

Seems a little too good to be true, but I don't know enough about the oxygen concentration process to comment. Any experts out there able to verify their claims? Here is a link to one of their papers:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03371464

The reason I ask is it recently won the Eureka prize for "Innovative Use of Technology". Also, it is a project running out of a big name University here in Melbourne, Australia.

helius:
Oxygen concentrators use a cryogenic bulb to condense nitrogen out of the air, leaving greater relative concentration of oxygen. The condensation process can be enhanced using materials that adsorb gas molecules to their surface (like a sponge for gases). Typically the cryogenic system is powered by electric pumps, but pumps can be driven by other methods.



What the paper you cite proposes is to use rainwater to drive a vacuum pump. This has nothing to do with generating oxygen for sick children: as usual these types of proposals employ emotional images to hide substandard engineering.

Is rainwater used to drive vacuum pumps anywhere currently? What are the engineering problems to use rainwater as a vacuum pump? Do more efficient and practical ways perhaps exist to extract energy from rain?

BradC:

--- Quote from: helius on September 04, 2017, 05:02:26 am ---
What the paper you cite proposes is to use rainwater to drive a vacuum pump. This has nothing to do with generating oxygen for sick children: as usual these types of proposals employ emotional images to hide substandard engineering
--- End quote ---

Maybe you best go back and actually read the paper.

PSA oxygen generators are used in medicine all the time. They can generate Oxygen at sufficient concentration to be clinically effective and this is an extremely novel embodiment of the process. They are using a simple venturi (see edit below) to create "enough" vacuum that it can be converted to sufficient pressure to drive the PSA process. Effectively a low pressure vacuum driven compressor.

With the right zeolite and an optimized sieve bed what they are suggesting is perfectly viable. If they can come up with a novel way to keep the sieve bed dry (a considerable about of energy is expended in a conventional PSA cycle keeping the beds purged to release the moisture) they'll make a significant contribution to medial PSA technology.

edit: It's even better than a venturi. Using the siphon pressure differential to enhance the vacuum. That's *really* clever.

helius:
I read as far as I needed to understand the technology being proposed. The design of a vacuum pump has nothing to do with concentrating oxygen. Vacuum pumps are used for a wide and diverse set of applications. Simple water aspirators, for example, are used in school science laboratories. None I am aware of use rainwater. I wonder why?

BradC:

--- Quote from: helius on September 04, 2017, 05:44:16 am ---The design of a vacuum pump has nothing to do with concentrating oxygen. Vacuum pumps are used for a wide and diverse set of applications. Simple water aspirators, for example, are used in school science laboratories. None I am aware of use rainwater. I wonder why?

--- End quote ---

Because the method being proposed is slow and relatively weak compared to a water aspirator, but it *is* enough to drive a pump to develop pressure to run PSA process when no other source of energy is available.

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