Economical synthesis of oxygen to combat the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The whole world has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and oxygen demand is greater than ever, but the supply is expectedly short. People in need of this oxygen are not able to receive it, especially those who cannot afford it. In addition to these issues, the oxygen from production plants is not getting delivered to hospitals on a timely basis due to insufficient availability of tankers and cylinders. It is therefore crucial to enable access of oxygen beds and cylinders to the public by developing economical methods for medical oxygen generation. Conventional methods like oxygen concentrators, the Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) Technique and Air Separation Units (ASUs) are either too expensive, energy intensive or feasible only on a small scale. This indicates the need to exploit methods that have not been utilized fully yet, such as Integrated Energy Systems (IES). However, reducing the cost of a process is not enough. It needs to be scaled up to have a real impact on the situation at hand. Ion Transport Membranes (ITM) are promising in this aspect as they can produce large volumes of extremely high-purity oxygen at low costs. All these methods along with their economic aspects have been discussed and then compared to identify the most feasible one.

Keywords: Air Separation Units (ASUs); COVID-19; DRE, Distributed Renewable Energy; ITM, Ion Transport Membranes; Integrated Energy Systems (IES); LMO, Liquid Medical Oxygen; Medical Oxygen; Oxygen Concentrators; Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA); WHO, World Health Organization.

Graphical abstract

Fig. 1

Principle of PSA (I – air input, O – oxygen output, E – exhaust, A – adsorption, D – desorption. (1) and (2) illustrate alternating adsorption and desorption.) (Wikimedia Commons contributors).

Fig. 2

Representation of an ASU (LOX – liquid oxygen, GOX – gaseous oxygen, LIN – liquid nitrogen, GAN – high purity gaseous nitrogen, A – low pressure column) (Pintilie et al., 2019).

Fig. 3

The IES system (OER LDH – Oxygen Evolution Reaction Layered Double Hydroxide, HER – Hydrogen Evolution Reaction) (Cai et al., 2019).

Fig. 4

Multiple energy sharing architecture (HN – Hydrogen Networks, GP – Grid Power) (Cui et al., 2022).

Fig. 5

Multiple Energy Sharing (Cui et al., 2022).

Fig. 6

ITM System.