What are your thoughts on that "New material steals oxygen from air"

[Michael.52]

Hey, I've been seeing articles being shared and circulated around facebook with my science-liking, sea-liking, diving, and even general friends regarding a new discovery/synthesis of a type of crystalline substance, that has a very high (but also reversible) absorption capacity of Oxygen... most of these people throwing some pretty ridiculous comments on it, reflecting many twisted articles from popular news sites, and nothing really thought-through.

Heres an official article about it, from the original soruce.
and the (a?) scientific paper on it (needs log-in access, to read beyond the abstract).

I would like to share my initial remarks about it, and see what ideas and thoughts you have on it's potential, applications (regarding diving), and problems.

First off, I've seen many ridiculous articles draw a picture that "in the near future we'll be able to breath underwater without diving equipment".
This is stupid, since this crystal will have to be harnessed into some piece of equipment along with a entire system around it, in order to be of any use. So all it can do is lead to development of a new type of SCUBA equipment.
Another point I haven't seen addressed (darn..! I though at least my diving friends sharing these posts would have the capacity to point his at least) is that we can't breath pure Oxygen underwater beyond a few meters deep because of toxicity when above 1.6atm ppO2. So Oxygen from such a crystal would have to be accompanied by a diluent of some sort, and this will bring us back to a load of equipment that we already know...be it big tanks carried on one's back filled mainly with N2, or be it a CCR with the only difference being instead of an Oxygen tank (that already is quite compact) an entire new system for releasing the O2 from the crystal, which by the way (as far as I understood the article) is a thermal process, and will be much less simpler and much less reliable (not to mention, currently, also much less cheaper) than a simple bottle/tank of compressed Oxygen.

So, as I said these are just some thoughts I threw into words, phrased kind of as a rant on the topic. But don't get my wrong this does seem to me like a really cool invention, with many potential applications such as medical ones (as one of the researchers said), but I feel people are over-reacting about it's diving related aspects.

Would love to hear some more thoughts aside from my own, especially from people who have more/other knowledge than me in either the scientific or the diving fields.

---------- Post added October 8th, 2014 at 10:58 PM ----------

This post might not be in the exact appropriate forum, if some moderator would move it to the right place that would be great.

 

[Subcooled]

Every atom takes up some space and a crystall has many atoms.

It is difficult to tell the exact volume an atom takes as the closer you go the stronger the repelling force... but that volume/radius is not getting smaller by adding the four or more atoms of a crystal structure (tetrahedron, pyramid, cube, ...)

You can get more oxygen atoms into volume X than you can get oxygen together with some crystals. A plain old O2 pressurized gas cylinder would have superior capacity. If you want to counter the repulsive electromagnetic force between two atoms then perhaps you could insert some black holes. They are known to have a large containing capacity but with some negative effects too. We would all end up there.

Now I know a better solution. You need to carry a surface supplied electric cable with you so that you can split water into oxygen and hydrogen. Then you can collect the oxygen with a suitable appliance and breathe it.
Be carefull though with hydrogen :fire:

____________
ps. I've heard of alternative physical CO2 filtering solutions not based on sofnolime, for rebreathers. Some material that absorbed or emitted CO2, and alterning use of two such systems. Don't remember the details.

 

[yardpro]

hogwash....

two objects CANNOT occupy the same space at the same time...PERIOD....

nothing will hold more air than an empty tank except a larger tank or higher pressure...

My degrees are biology and physics, so i get a kick out of all the knee jerk hype placed on crap like this..

 

[Subcooled]

Hmm... how about a small nuclear reactor based on fission?

None of them are producing oxygen, though (and they tend to be largish).