They don't need bulk oxygen generated ad-hoc. They need medical grade oxygen delivered in standard medical equipment that they can use in a controlled manner right away.

Chemistry experiments won't solve this.

> They don't need bulk oxygen generated ad-hoc. They need medical grade oxygen delivered in standard medical equipment that they can use in a controlled manner right away.

Right now, I believe from reports on the ground, that they need just any oxygen to hold on for 2-3 more weeks.

First hand report I got is that LO2 tankers been all around on TV, but despite that all hospitals in the area been empty of oxygen for 3-4 weeks without any resupply coming in sight, and this is in one of richest cities in India.

> Chemistry experiments won't solve this.

Tell this to people about to die. You are so cynical. 1.5-2 kg of oxygen per hour should be enough to support 2 people. 20 at least 10.

The mess, depravity, and despair I heard is such that people have already tried just anything.

Zeolite has been sold out across India for a few weeks.

Hydrogen peroxide sold out.

Any chemical which can be used to produce oxygen chemically is out of stock.

People are already blowing themselves up, and causing blackouts by following Youtube voodoo science trying to make completely unsound electrolyzer designs.

You are not getting any "proper" oxygen concentrators coming any time soon with all of above.

This design is at least less of a voodoo science than ones telling people to breath brown gas.

Please, give the medical system in India at least a tiny bit of respect and stop trying to armchair quarterback their solutions with your chemistry knowledge.

They know what they need better than you do. They're not going to MacGyver their solution by improvising an industrial chemical production process with welding equipment and random chemicals.

Being able to make oxygen in a chemistry experiment is not equivalent to being able to deliver oxygen to patients in a medically appropriate manner using standard medical equipment.

You are so sarcastic, and pricky. You will not be getting more popular like this.

I advice you to come to India, and tell it to people dying on porches of hospitals. Tell it to doctors seeing people come, and die.

> give the medical system in India at least a tiny bit of respect and stop trying to armchair quarterback

Before demanding respect, one has to learn how to behave respectfully himself.

Please stop this.

The have sufficient industrial oxygen that can be repurposed. The problem is delivery to hospitals. They need more tankers and cylinders.

> The problem is delivery to hospitals. They need more tankers and cylinders.

If the number of tankers is as much as Indian media show, then the situation should've been resolved weeks ago.

Please read my comment below on what's actually happening. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26974630

All those sudden oxygen leaks, equipment failures, or massive amounts of stored O2 disappearing is all about O2 infrastructure being in a bad state long before the Covid, and it coming to surface now.

Go to a praxair in the states and ask what the difference is: tested to 5x9's and loaded into a vacuum pulled bottle. ANY O2 at pressure is suitable to for human consumption at the surface because ANY impurities that are actually harmful would explode at 200 bar. Anything else (say from a PSA nitrox generator) would only be things like Argon.

Ad hoc O2 is better than no O2.

You can't breathe in industrial Oxygen. At least, you need a humidifier cycle in between or it's going to dry out your lungs.

The simplest bubbler solves this issue.

And then you need to filter the output of the bubbler because microparticules will be suspended in the gas flow, and then you need to sterilize it, because you don't know what's growing in the bubbler, and then cool it down (is sterilize by heating it), and then you need to regulate the pressure of volume, etc....

hacking-rig an industrial oxygen generator is a very different thing from being able to generate breathable medical oxygen - when you're done with all the steps you'll end up at something that's very expensive and difficult to maintain in the end

That's natural, all breathing apparatuses already have to be treated like that. Having to washing the bubbler once in a while if a by far the better option to dying.

> When you're done with all the steps you'll end up at something that's very expensive and difficult to maintain in the end

Your alternatives?

> I see oxygen production being such a basic industrial process, that I never could've imagined even a most poorly industrialised country having troubles producing it.

This article discusses some of the challenges being faced, sounds like most of them are around distribution. India has a large steel industry which is very capable of generating and condensing oxygen.

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/coronavirus-second-w...

LO2 reserve in any hospital should've been enough for weeks per refill.

And hospital with on-site O2 generation should've never had any issue. Any industrial scale O2 production machinery would've had many times the capacity reserve.

But they didn't. Double digit of hospital O2 generators were out of service, and LO2 tanks were never filled to full because hospitals were saving on LO2 service.

Some hospitals with central O2 systems from either tanks, or generators simply had them disabled for unfathomable reasons, had them broken down years ago without any attempt at repair, or simply never ever used them, so they don't know how to operate them.

You mention "poorly industrialised country" and then go on to list at least hundreds of dollars worth of equipment and supplies and access to a 200A 220V electrical service. A poor household in India has easy access to none of these resources.

Cheapest 200A welder costs like $30-$40 dollars in India.

200A service... , can't say how it's now, but even like 20 years ago, 100A was omnipresent in larger cities. Even with just few kilowatts you should still be easily producing above a kilogram per hour.

The thrust of the comment is helpful though as it's the hospitals that have run out of oxygen and facing prospective multi-week deficits of oxygen.

Using crudely produced industrial oxygen for medical purposes (human breathing) is dangerous. Even with the warnings included above, people will not fully understand the risks and consequences of using a DIY oxygen generator, including long-term lung damage.

Have you worked with medical oxygen in a practical setting? People are desperate and might give this a try. In real medical scenario, O2 is provided as LMO (liquid medical oxygen) with 99.5% purity. It is given to patients via equipment that is meant to regulate pressure and flow-rate.

> Connect it to oxygen supply through a breathing bag. Make some holes in the breathing bag. Eye the calculation so that incoming oxygen displaces at least 10 times the volume of exhaled CO2

You first need a clean and secure place to store it at pressure enough to be continuously consumed by a living breathing human.

Generating oxygen with this means will inevitably result in mixing impurities via the coating on the electrodes or any pre-existing corrosion on the electrodes. Salts mixed into lye, soda, or other salts added to increase conductivity, can result in toxic chlorine and chloride fumes. Heating at the electrode will result in further unexpected fumes.

You are suggesting plastic equipment around a 200A electrodes. If plastic is melting around the electrodes, imagine those fumes also mixing in.

These are just few of the problems that comes to my mind. I am sure an actual expert will know better. Please refrain from posting such garbage, especially medical information.

> You are suggesting plastic equipment around a 200A electrodes.

I'm not suggesting 200A at electrodes. The actual current will be much less with water resistance, you will obviously melt plastic if you put full short circuit current into it.

It's also welding machines themselves are not created for continuous operation, especially electronics based ones. A 100A ones will croak, and go into safety shutdown even from operating at 10% of load continuously.

> You first need a clean and secure place to store it at pressure enough to be continuously consumed by a living breathing human.

You don't have to store it, it's about continuous generation.

> Salts mixed into lye, soda, or other salts added to increase conductivity, can result in toxic chlorine and chloride fumes.

Obviously you will electrolyze chlorine if there is enough of it, but you need to really be electrolyzing sea water like salt concentration for it to be an issue.

> Please refrain from posting such garbage, especially medical information.

I will not refrain. I will talk more with you once I will see your engineering credentials, which I believe you don't have after reading all of above.

    Do you guys still need oxygen there? How is the situation there really?

India is the largest producer of Oxygen and vaccine in the world! Despite this, we are facing a shortage of both.

Then how did we get in to such a situation? The reason is the complete apathy of the government in planning and preparation.

While we are the largest producers of Oxygen in the world, we only have 2000 trucks to transport them. Failure to plan and improve the logistics is one of the reason why all are hospitals are now facing Oxygen scarcity, even though we have a surplus of it! The second reason is failure to upgrade existing infrastructure in hospitals.

According to an opposition leader, we exported 60 million vaccines between January and March of this year, while we had only vaccinated around 30 to 40 million of our own people!

Our vaccine plans also hit a hurdle when a US vaccine by Novavax, that has been licensed for production in India, is facing hurdles of getting the raw material for the vaccine from US (that has obviously prioritized it for its own needs).

According to the same opposition leader, we also exported around 1.1 million doses of Remdesivir to other countries. And our media is showing people desperate to buy Remdesivir from anywhere at any price.

In between all this, the government permitted huge gatherings of people in election rallies and religious occasions.

Summary: We had all the resources. But apathy and poor planning screwed up India's fight against COVID.