Astronauts and deep-sea scuba divers sometimes breathe pure oxygen because they work in very dangerous places. Sick people, including premature babies in hospital or people in hospital with the coronavirus , might also need some extra help breathing. It acts like a medicine to help calm and settle their breathing.
Again, too much oxygen can be dangerous. So we need oxygen to help us get energy from our food. But too much oxygen can harm us. Home USQ News Curious Kids: what happens if you breathe pure oxygen? By Mark Lynch, Lecturer Chemistry. If you have ever seen a magic show, you might see some spectacular demonstrations of combustion using liquid oxygen. How can pure oxygen be obtained from air? Chemistry Matter Elements. Feb 6, Explanation: This is not a reaction I would be happy doing, and is the preserve of the specialist.
Related questions What periodic table elements are radioactive? How can the periodic table be used to predict the properties of the elements? After World War II, new technologies brought significant improvements to the air separation process used to produce oxygen. Production volumes and purity levels increased while costs decreased. In , over billion cubic feet Oxygen can be produced from a number of materials, using several different methods.
The most common natural method is photo-synthesis, in which plants use sunlight convert carbon dioxide in the air into oxygen. This offsets the respiration process, in which animals convert oxygen in the air back into carbon dioxide. The most common commercial method for producing oxygen is the separation of air using either a cryogenic distillation process or a vacuum swing adsorption process.
Nitrogen and argon are also produced by separating them from air. Oxygen can also be produced as the result of a chemical reaction in which oxygen is freed from a chemical compound and becomes a gas. This method is used to generate limited quantities of oxygen for life support on submarines, aircraft, and spacecraft.
Hydrogen and oxygen can be generated by passing an electric current through water and collecting the two gases as they bubble off.
Hydrogen forms at the negative terminal and oxygen at the positive terminal. This method is called electrolysis and produces very pure hydrogen and oxygen.
It uses a large amount of electrical energy, however, and is not economical for large-volume production. Most commercial oxygen is produced using a variation of the cryogenic distillation process originally developed in Here are the steps used to produce commercial-grade oxygen from air using the cryogenic distillation process.
Because this process utilizes an extremely cold cryogenic section to separate the air, all impurities that might solidify—such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, and certain heavy hydrocarbons—must first be removed to prevent them from freezing and plugging the cryogenic piping. A test tube said to contain the last breath of Thomas Edison and given to Henry Ford, and ardent fan, as a keepsake by Edison's son Charles. It is said to contain the last breath of Thomas Alva Edison, the great inventor.
According to Edison's son Charles, a set of eight empty test tubes sat on the table next to Edison's deathbed in Immediately after Edison expired, his physician, put several of the tubes up to Edison's lips to catch the carbon dioxide from his deflating lungs.
Then, the physician carefully sealed each tube with paraffin and gave the tubes to Charles Edison. The museum acquired the tube after the death of both Henry and Clara Ford. There is some discussion among visitors just how much carbon dioxide and how much oxygen currently is contained in the tube. Some ask if anyone evacuated the tube of oxygen before putting the tube to Edison's mouth very unlikely.
If not, how much of Edison's breath could be in the tube? So, they say, it contains both carbon dioxide and oxygen? Nonetheless, it is an unconventional tribute to a great man by those sorry to see his light extinguished.
Air is separated into its major components—nitrogen, oxygen, and argon—through a distillation process known as fractional distillation.
Sometimes this name is shortened to fractionation, and the vertical structures used to perform this separation are called fractionating columns. In the fractional distillation process, the components are gradually separated in several stages. At each stage the level of concentration, or fraction, of each component is increased until the separation is complete. Because all distillation processes work on the principle of boiling a liquid to separate one or more of the components, a cryogenic section is required to provide the very low temperatures needed to liquefy the gas components.
The oxygen at the bottom of the low-pressure column is about Newer cryogenic distillation units are designed to recover more of the argon from the low-pressure column, and this improves the oxygen purity to about In some parts of the country, an extensive network of pipelines serves many end users over an area of hundred of miles kilometers.
The gas is compressed to about psi 3. Most of the remaining oxygen is distributed in insulated tank trailers or railroad tank cars as liquid oxygen. The Compressed Gas Association establishes grading standards for both gaseous oxygen and liquid oxygen based on the amount and type of impurities present.
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