OK, my late reply to a very old thread... My own research field isn't very far removed from the subject of this article about the "oxygen stealing material", and I just took the time to read the original article. It's a nice piece of science, BUT you folks should realize something before planning new scuba gear based on this cobalt complex. The compound holds about 3-6% it's weight in oxygen. In other words, you'd need ca. 20x the mass of compound for a given mass of O2.
Using very rough calculations: A standard Al80 @ 3000psi carries about 6 pounds of air, which is about 1.2 lbs of O2. That means you'd need ~24 lbs of the cobalt compound to store the O2 in 1 AL80. That's excluding the hardware needed to heat the stuff to release the O2. Since a an Al80 weighs ~31 lbs, it's not obvious you're going to save much weight. And if you use cave fills the savings are even less. Finally, it would take about 33lbs of the stuff to store the equivalent of a 19cf bottle of 100% O2 (again without equipment to get the O2 back out.)
Like I said, it's a neat bit of science, and there are certain novel aspects to the work from a scientific standpoint, but the technological utility is a bit oversold in the paper (which is actually quite normal when you need to secure future funding.)
PS In case any science-minded (or non-American) folks were wondering about a chemistry prof giving results in lbs, I translated the values to imperial units for the convenience of the non-metric readers. The 'murican way of designating cylinder is almost too stupid for words, but that's another battle.
Using very rough calculations: A standard Al80 @ 3000psi carries about 6 pounds of air, which is about 1.2 lbs of O2. That means you'd need ~24 lbs of the cobalt compound to store the O2 in 1 AL80. That's excluding the hardware needed to heat the stuff to release the O2. Since a an Al80 weighs ~31 lbs, it's not obvious you're going to save much weight. And if you use cave fills the savings are even less. Finally, it would take about 33lbs of the stuff to store the equivalent of a 19cf bottle of 100% O2 (again without equipment to get the O2 back out.)
Like I said, it's a neat bit of science, and there are certain novel aspects to the work from a scientific standpoint, but the technological utility is a bit oversold in the paper (which is actually quite normal when you need to secure future funding.)
PS In case any science-minded (or non-American) folks were wondering about a chemistry prof giving results in lbs, I translated the values to imperial units for the convenience of the non-metric readers. The 'murican way of designating cylinder is almost too stupid for words, but that's another battle.
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