Oxygen - A User's Guide

I, V, M. I think like, I mean, as many unfortunate people do I work in advertising and digital marketing. So in that you have these, I mean, you end up seeing a lot of graphs of view-through rate, where the view-through rate drops after a point of time based on the video progression and all that. It'd be really interesting to see the drop off rate for 75.

Like, where is that drop off happening? Like, probably in this episode when I started laughing like a meme. There's a huge people there where people started dropping off. So Shri Keh, this is the reason why we don't ask our producer for analytics.

So, I would like to... But there's like a whole like Indian, middle class sunk-cost fantasy that keeps going. Like, if you order like a bad juice, I once ordered like what is called Butterfrode Shake. I had no idea what the damn thing was.

Like, there's a most expensive thing on the bottom. I took the cake. Yeah, it's, I have a card, I don't know. So like, this was like in my early college days, something when I gulped down colars by the cans.

But so I had one super fan, it was the most awful thing that I had. But I had already paid 80 rupees for it, so I had to finish. Yeah, 80 rupees for even in college was like, wow. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

This is, the news is, avocado is referred to as Butterfrode. Yeah. This is, this is, it's what it is in the Southern Hemisphere. Yeah.

So if you say avocado in Malayalam, it means it's for her. So... Also, guacamole. What I was just about to say.

What am I saying? What? Molay, molay. Guacaboy.

Molay is, you know, like daughter. Yeah. Otherwise, let me put this in language, I don't understand. Guaca 6.0, 2, 3 into 10 to 10 to Eastern.

Guacamole. I work out on number. Oh, you know. I was, I was actually going for guacamole, but okay.

I did this, I did not complete. This is what happens when your college is in Trishu, instead of Lokhandwala. You don't know about things like avocado and I'll tell you. I love how this, the sun's gone.

This is true. Yeah, it's, it's fascinating. It's, it's, it's, the middle class. You do, you end up, so you have to pay in points now.

First you just, it was hurting because you paid the money. Now it's hurting because you paid the money and you ate the garbage. Yeah. Yeah.

So you're hurting. So I take it for simplifying. Oh man. I mean, if there's a new listener who got to this point.

Like, what is, what happened? So what happened to my day? Why am I, are two sets of audiences are some loyal listeners. I don't know why.

And people who study like social experiments like scientists. Looking at cultural phenomena in this week. I got it. I got it.

Like, if you look at the set of simplified listeners and the set of masochists in India, like that is like, what is the next comment set? Actually, a set of simplified listeners is a set of people who have, they started thinking about what is the meaning of life. Yeah. Almost the same because life has no meaning, neither is simple.

They've broken out of the top of the Maslow hierarchy and got to do another piece. You're the best actually. Yeah. We have the Dogecoin of podcasts.

Yeah. It's instantly, my son told me that he bought two dollars worth of Dogecoin as a joke. Okay. Oh, congratulations.

200 dollars now. You're fine. Yeah. He had originally, like he was dared somebody had dared him to put a thousand dollars in.

Oh, wow. Wow. So he's like, you know, I would have retired. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So I have joined Tony in the crypto world. So I have been a little bit of money over the course of it. Let's see how things are. Let's see how things are.

I think I'm all right. I'm all right. I'm actually in the city. I'm actually in both.

Yeah. But I was saying like how the new Indian parent in response is changed to when your friend asked you to jump into the well-wined into you. No, no, no, no. Now the mentality is before you jump into the well, there's a by-juice course for this.

You see that and then you'll see the exact angle through which you can jump. You can jump into the well-wined into the well-wined. Yeah. That's what we're talking about.

You're talking about something else doing this episode. Yeah. That also could be a tagline for the world. But take a by-juice course.

That's what we were supposed to talk about something else in this episode. So what are we talking about today? Something we can talk about something which is all around us, something which we need, something which we cannot live without. And that's not WhatsApp.

That is, I mean, WhatsApp is a good answer, but it's not WhatsApp, it's oxygen. Right? So. And I've been wondering because everyone's been going on and on about how oxygen is not available, you know, and it's, you know, people are dying because of the lack of it.

So I decided to just sort of rifle through the internet and see what was available. And it's pretty interesting, the entire story of oxygen itself. So first, I have to say that for the longest period, it went by the very awesome name of de-flogisticated air. So oxygen was called- Logisticated.

Yeah. Oxygen itself. Yeah. So there was something called Floggeston theory which said that if there is floggeston in something, then it burns.

And then the floggeston, you know, it all that kind of thing. So floggeston was something that was in the substance that needed to be in the substance that needed to be burned. And when that left that whatever was being burned, combustion happened, burning happened. And like, you know, simplified to totally have been around back then because people swallowed that.

So they, so people who have got here. Wow. Yeah. We were the ancient Greek podcast that was not- So we find- So floggeston, floggeston sounds like a country that might be popular when it's made a lot of time.

Actually, we should- There are several countries which qualify for floggeston. Including the Indian middle class itself actually. Yeah. And floggeston, floggeston.

And we were floggeston. And we were floggeston. And we were in logic stunt. Yeah.

Wow. And so there's this guy named Carl M. Shil. His name is Pronoun Shilah.

So, he's the flog. And now we know how we got into this topic. This is Narnin Swai for those who are wondering why Narnin Swai. She's the tree on which hangs the fruit of my life.

Oh. Okay. So, the rest of us are not quite sure how to take off from this. So, let's just start and use it.

Yeah. Just quickly note the timestamp of the episode right now so you can bookmark and- What we forgot to tell our listeners was we had to cancel the previous recording because Narnin forgot his anniversaries. So, I think Carl M. just proceeded as a good reason for that.

It was literally the previous night. And I told Shilah that I had to wake up in the morning early because I was- Yeah, I was out of the mind. It's all my clothes. She says, I am your most loyal listener.

You like it? She's like, I'm kidding. This is such a- This is a whole- This is an action. Yeah, this is an old joke.

No, remember our anniversary. Like, of course, this is the day in which Arsenal won the cup or something that's so something of that. So, something of that. But you know, and Shilah?

Shilah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, this happened in 17, 17, something.

And Antoine Loaazia really figured it out. So, he- And he was a guy who named it Oxygen because it was generating Oxides. Hey, but basically she like to say- Basically she like to say before. No, actually, no.

Oxygen probably means life increase. It's not- It's all- Then the oxidation thing came later. Yeah, so, Loaazia and- Loaazia got the Nobel Prize of that time, which is the guillotine. So, he got- No.

I mean, we would do your research to find out oxygen in the world. Wow. You even prove that it's an element and- So, you take a piece of tin and burn it in a closed space and wait and find it a mass or not change and you know, sort of prove that whatever was in the air and now gone into that and become oxide. Wow.

And the government says, Yes, a short list. Yeah, it's a short list. Literally, it's a short list. So, actually, there's a- Nereen where you were talking about that I actually found the very interesting etymology of oxygen.

That oxygen actually comes from the Greek, which is Oxus, which is sharp acid. Because when the Lavosia actually discovered oxygen as such, he thought it was essential for the formation of acids. It was an ingredient which is essential for formation of acid. That's why he named it Oxygen.

This is actually a misnomer. So, basically, the word oxygen itself has nothing to do with what oxygen is supposed to do in any way. Yeah. So, Pedition for an internship, oxygen.

Anyway, I found that so totally sad that this guy had to be- He was a minor aristocrat, apparently, and that's why he went to the- Well, he became even more minor. Yeah, he became even more minor. But this is post Renaissance and all. So, so- Yeah, it was- Yeah, it was- When was the French Revolution?

Sometimes 1799 or something, right? So, yeah, so that's when- So, it's like- It wasn't sort of the mobile price for the oxygen. It was the sort of price for being whatever minor tax collector that he was. You know why they call it the French Revolution, though?

Because it was so he heads up the head store. He heads up the head store revolving- Have you known? I'm back to you. Too soon?

Too soon? It's been too soon? It's been too soon in the morning. I was just told that I've been- I'm not going to picture heads rolling down the guitar.

Well, I hope you have a- Yeah, I know. But actually, during the cab, there were people who would do all kinds of- So, there would be, you know, sort of- It would be a- Public- Public- Public- Yeah. And when the head was locked off, people would go and, you know, try to see what- So, oftentimes the head would still be like, you know, the eyes would still be moving. Yeah, that's- That's cheerful.

Yeah. You would slap the face and see the, you know, the color on the face change. Oh, nice. Is this science or just like- I've tried it really.

It is- So, the brain takes a little- A couple of seconds to- So, you will pass off. If you, you know, if someone strengthens you, you become unconscious because the brain isn't getting any oxygen. And it takes a couple of seconds for that to happen because the blood that's already there in the brain is oxygenated. So, very nice.

And can we quickly use that as our opportunity to segue to the topic back? Yes. Oh, yeah. And we need a lot of oxygen.

It is element number eight and it is 1.4 grams per liter. And we need a lot of it. So, at 1.4 grams, just 1.4 grams per liter, we end up requiring 7 kilos of it per day purpose. All of each of us.

We need 7 kilo grams of air, actually, which contain about 21% of oxygen, but we need that. And that's the thing. That's the number that appears in the calculations because when someone is down with something like COVID and your lung capacity is seriously compromised. So, normally, air has 21% of oxygen and the rest of it is mostly nitrogen.

So, 78% is nitrogen and 1% is everything else. Carbon dioxide, everything, everything. And it takes- The body takes it and it throws out the nitrogen and takes in the oxygen. And if you're lungs are damaged, that's not enough.

So, you need a lot more. And that's why you have- We're going to talk about how oxygen is concentrated and how- So, in- Had COVID happened maybe 100 and something years ago, all of us would have died because- I mean, all patients would have probably who had got complications that died because no one knew how to concentrate oxygen. No one knew how to capture. So, Michael Faraday tried it, right?

So, Michael Faraday was playing around with different gases and he tried compressing those gases. And several of them liquefied. But some gases, most frustratingly, wouldn't liquefy at all. They just wouldn't become- No matter how much pressure you put in there, they wouldn't liquefied.

And then he figured out they also need to be cooled. So, it's just not enough. So, you can have any amount of pressure at- So, these gases, oxygen on the nitrogen or the other, hydrogen on the other, he called them permanent gases. He said they're never going to liquefy.

And then there was this guy named Charles Linde. And Linde was- He was like an expert on refrigeration at that time. So, refrigeration. Okay.

So, this is much later than Faraday. Of course, it's- I think turn of the century. He figured out how to cool things. And he was the guy who really found that he could liquefy air, make it completely liquid.

And then he could boil off everything that wasn't required. And so he made oxygen by that. So, he liquefied air and 78% of nitrogen inlet it go. And he would be left with oxygen.

Your liquid oxygen, which I guess could then be converted into gas. No, this is two steps. First to you? No, you liquefy the air.

It will minus 200 and- Wow. More than what your average- Like colder than your average- Average flig. And then how do they separate out? It's fractional distillation.

So, I'm not sure if you're not going to go to the hospital. Just to start about- Wait a minute, Julian. I mean- Yeah, definitely. I was hoping nobody would bring up my chemical engineering.

Just- Just- Nightmarry, I'm just like someone who asked him- See, you have already used the keywords that I was planning to use. You sent for actual distillation, you sent Faraday. And Shrieketh also said the etymology of oxygen. So, I have nothing else to say.

Hell, you all have a safety reaction. Alpha-bromination. Just keep throwing it out. You might as well do that from the old first AIB sketch thing, Faraday.

Faraday. That's why it stuck in my head. But this is the same process still followed up. Yeah, so it's called a Linda Franklin- Franklin process.

A Francal as in Victor-Frankel. We spoke about a few episodes ago. In your play? But it wasn't Victor-Frankel.

I went to find out who the Francal in the Linda-Frankel was. There's no record of that on the Internet. Really? If anyone finds out, please let me know.

I studied engineering knowing that as Linda-Frankel process. Seriously? Yeah, and that's because it's very important for steel making. So, steel making is my- Right.

So, steel making- There's an interesting story about that if I can- If I can- If I can- I can actually do with oxygen and nothing to do with oxygen concentrators. But here's the story. So, there is a- During the end of the world war, there was an Austrian town named Linz. Linz and tournaments, who were Austrian- Austrian- Austrian- And the Allies, it was this particular area came under the Americans.

And they're brief- To dismantle the industrial military complex of the Germans. They didn't want the Germans to come back to- You know, ever be a threat again. I mean, So, this- What am I saying? Linz and tournaments.

Linz and tournaments are two places. And Linz was the site of a steel plant where- Like some revolutionary steel making was happening. They were making a lot of steel and really good quality steel and use for tanks and things of that. And they wanted to dismantle it.

This mantle it means just sort of take all the machinery and break it into bits with a big hammer. So, there was this guy named Robert Durer who went to the American general in charge and told him that I strongly recommend that we don't make it because we are on the verge of doing something that will revolutionize the steel industry to give you a lot of very good inexpensive steel which will be great for your automotive industry. So, immediately American- So, immediately Americanized years stood up and he gave Robert Durer a few years. So, it took him three years to perfect it and it's called the Linz tournaments process and it's the process which is used for particularly all the steel making in the world today.

And it's also called basic oxygen steel and what Robert Durer did was he improved the Bessemer converter process which is basically taking a whole bunch of iron ore and whatever and heating it with air. So, Robert Durer figured out how to pump oxygen into it and that would take away almost all the impurities that would remain in the Bessemer process and you get extremely pure. And it's not as trivial as it sounds because when they were doing it, the oxygen would just sort of oxidize the surface of the melt and go away. So, Durer figured out the engineering of how to pump the oxygen and how to make sure that it bubbles too.

It was technically very difficult but he managed that and he just about made it. Like on Tuesday the plant is going to be dismantled and Monday night like the first heat of that kind of. This is the traffic, the best explanation is caused by last minute panic. Yeah, entire generation of engineers is Indonesia.

I can't believe we got all that. So, you can know that it wasn't just my chemical engineering batch but as far back as Mr. Burke were you talking about? Anyway, where were we?

So, yeah, so the thing that really made it possible was the lint of Frenkel process because lint Frenkel made oxygen available at very, very high purity at very low cost. So, once you put out the plant, it was very inexpensive relatively to make the oxygen and had that not been there a bit. So, because you had such excellent steel, you could make steel sheets thinner and sort of shape them into the car shapes that you got. And that made cars lighter, that made them more efficient, that made them more inexpensive and the automotive revolution.

Because from the 50s to today, it's just been, you know, cars in relative terms, they really diminished and are like become cheaper if you adjusted for the innovations. And become mostly because you don't need the two horses anymore. Yeah, so that was, and even today, that is the major use of oxygen in India, in industry. So, steel making is, India makes some 7000 metric tons of oxygen per day.

Out of which some five or six thousand is used for steel making. So, that makes sense then because I saw this, some news about how the Tata plant was sending over a bunch of oxygen to places that it was needed. It's a big decision for them because if they have to decouple the oxygen from their blast furnace, blast furnace are humongous. They have to shut it down.

You can't just turn off the gas. You have to, like, you know, it's like, it takes a long time for the blast furnace to be wound down. Also, it takes a long time for it to start again. So, it's very comical.

So, if they have shut down a blast furnace, they have taken a big hit in the wallet. So, I'll respect the Tata. All the steel tons have done that. So, don't make steel.

Yeah, we have no mix. That's actually a great company idea. That would be amazing. I'll be like a short time.

Imagine a front page ad with that we also don't make steel. I have actually seen the Tata steel blast furnace. I did my sambarind internship, not during chemical engineering, but at Mica, I decided to go to Tata Steel and do my internship, which was in Tata Nagar, which is a jumpshed poor kuru jinim. And I saw the famous Tata steel blast furnace.

And you're right, it's quite an occasion of it. You're turning, shutting it down is not a simple two step process on windows. It's quite something that is bloody hot. I used to have a computer, but to shut down, blast furnace is probably like that.

Now that we are all done with the science part of steel making, it's a good time to reveal that I'm actually a metallurgical engineer. No, it's a chemical engineer and a metallurgical engineer. Panic flashbacks to iron carbide diagrams. So, you've probably studied all this, this L.D.

process and everything. I probably stopped putting this on the sports. Only you're fast against this. I know, he's like engineering shaving you.

Yeah, I speak with the word Shakespeare or something. He's studying English, which was something. Yeah, man. I find all the things I've studied, I find metallurgy the most fascinating, especially the metallurgy of steel.

Let's like, insane, the things people have done and found out. Basically, all of metallurgy, I think 90% of metallurgy is like steel. Yeah. Yeah.

So, more ashamed by the minute. Finally, also my professor says that this is one guy who will be a permanent guest. So, I probably won't have to do it. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, now let us concentrate on oxygen. So, one question, so this same oxygen made in a steel plant is... They probably can. They have a little...

So, they have something like two or 400 liters of oxygen or something. Yeah. So, you need some five to ten liters of oxygen per minute. So, it'll just give you, you know, something like half an hour or a fucking minute.

Yeah, I mean, we... Yeah, I don't know the capacity. I'm supposed to know all the physics of this because I've got that certification. How long are your dives?

So, that's the thing. So, if we go down... It depends on how long we stay under water. Typically, if we are staying to say 20 meters, that should last a good diver somewhere from 50 to 60 minutes.

And I say good only because sometimes you panic under water and you breathe more and that 50 minutes becomes closer to 30 minutes. But yeah. I guess you cannot under any circumstances touch that limit, right? Because if you run out of oxygen...

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, this is a hard stop. So, you have to like around 50 or 20% of your tank, one to three, reaches that critical limit no matter what you are, where you are, how beautiful the sights are, you have to...

You have to surface. And there's another thing where you always have to be diving in groups of two as in you always have what is called a body. So, yeah, I'm surprised you know this. If you, for whatever reason, some problem happens either you run out of oxygen or the thing.

That makes the oxygen from the tank to your mouth is not working. You actually, whenever you dive, you actually carry two regulators as they are called. The thing that goes in the mouth. So, there's always two.

And the purpose of the second one is one is to act for yourself and two if somebody else needs it. Then you attach them and then there's a very beautiful dance that you do and then you have to hold hands and they need to surface up together. And the reason I ask also is because all these cool but having places are usually in remote locations, right? So, that might actually, those compressors that these diving shops have might actually be good places to get decent breathable oxygen in remote locations.

Which don't have access to hospitals or formal medical care. So, in place these things make oxygen? So, yeah, so, the process is when you actually generate oxygen, you know, and the actual even lint, frankly, doesn't generate oxygen and purifies it. If you want to generate it, you would have to electrolyze water or you would have to do something else.

In the older days, they used to take some minerals, heat them with other minerals and then the reaction would release oxygen and trap all that oxygen. It's really inefficient when it does that. In the 80s or the 70s, I think, someone figured out that you could pass gas through molecular, porous material, which allows some molecules to pass in some not to. And you could remove nitrogen from it and enrich the oxygen.

So, this was called its adsorption, basically. So, adsorption is not adsorption. Adsorption is when the surface captures the molecule of whatever you're trying to capture. And they did a clever bit of engineering called pressure swing adsorption.

So, you take the air, you push it through this molecular sieve, through this. It's actually like a stone, one stone which is very porous. So, you pass it through that stone and under high pressure. So, the air is forced in, the nitrogen is trapped on the stone, the oxygen passes through.

And then when you release the pressure, the stone gives up the nitrogen. So, the nitrogen comes back, but you send it through another pole. So, that's the exhaust. So, you have two cylinders.

So, in one, you pressurize one cylinder and it starts generating oxygen. And then you release the pressure, it starts giving the nitrogen that it has trapped, it gives it back. But now you change the pressure so that it shoots the nitrogen back to the other end. And when this is happening, you use the other cylinder to generate another cylinder.

So, now the pressure is diverted there through a wall. So, it's very clever engineering. And they did that and it took them a little while. The first, they didn't figure out on pressure.

They did something called temperature swing adsorption. So, you can do the same thing by raising and decreasing temperature. But raising and decreasing temperatures are very clunky. It doesn't happen very quickly.

It takes time. And changing pressure is very easy. It's just a matter of having walls. So, they did that.

And that became a big boon for the medical industry. So, hospitals still use oxygen cylinders and people have banks of oxygen cylinders, which are actually going to have a manifold in their pressure at reducing walls and everything. They're still dangerous. That's one of the reasons why we have been seeing fires in COVID centers.

Okay, that's because the enriched oxygen makes every little spark a potential, like the flames, it fans the flames, actually. The oxygen atmosphere. So, if you have any leaky oxygen, you're sitting on a fire hazard right there. So, in fact, just now there was a, I mean, I was reading about a fire that happened in Iraq.

And there, in one of the hospitals, they, I mean, they, they're the same thing. It was the ICU. And the reason the fire like spread so quickly and like, that thing was because as you see with ICU, what they have that, what they call the drop ceiling, right? With all the medical equipment in the ceiling and stuff.

So, they were actually passing oxygen through the ceiling. So, that's where when the fire like started, like it literally like, and got the whole place because it was going through the ceiling across the board. So, where, so, where the oxygen because it was going through that. So, I mean, oxygen, and to be fair, that's also, I mean, the most famous oxygen leak of all time is Apollo 13.

So, Apollo 13, when it was, the whole thing about the lunar module was one of the, so they had to regularly stir the oxygen tanks, right? So, during one of the stirs of the oxygen tanks, there was a small spark somewhere which caused the entire main module to explode and one entire fuel site to explode. And that's the whole reason that was the most successful failure ever because they got it back to earth eventually. So, yeah, that's, I mean, oxygen is dangerous to up to play with.

But the funny thing is by itself, oxygen is not flammable. Interesting. Because when something burns, something combines with oxygen. So, oxygen, it combines with oxygen, oxygen doesn't burn, but it sure has helped everything else to burn.

It's the greatest catalyst ever. Yeah. So, it's there, it's dangerous. And, yeah, so that's one of the things.

So, in space, you actually like, taken pure oxygen as it. You would store oxygen and hydrogen. And we're talking about oxygen and hydrogen. We have created water, right?

Oxygen and hydrogen. So, I think the hydrogen is flammable. The hydrogen exploded and the oxygen really enabled it. Yeah.

And hydrogen itself is a very, it's so small. The molecules are so small. It's extended difficult to contain it and anything. It literally oozes out through the interest of anything that you hold, you know, used to hold hydrogen.

So, hydrogen, that's one of the reasons why hydrogen and fuel cells still haven't made it, you know, to any life. Otherwise, it's a great solution. So, you make, like the same, the end of the frontal process can also be used to make hydrogen. And actually, you know, purify concentrated user to any number of gases, nitrogen also manufactured the same way.

And you could have like, tanks of that. So, one tank of hydrogen, two tanks of oxygen, like any other thing, and just enough to make two tanks of hydrogen, one type of oxygen actually. And you just make a water and keep going. But these are huge technical problems that still haven't been welcome.

We can write, I mean, amazing code to do machine learning and everything like that, but we cannot figure out how to hold hydrogen in a tank. Yeah, it's because all these chemical and metallurgical engineers say. That's a good point. Oh, man.

So, that is a big thing. Hospitals still use a similar kind of, you know, pressure swing adsorption, make a plant to generate oxygen on site. So, big hospital will have that plant that is basement and it will be generating oxygen holding it and cylinder them piping it throughout the hospital. That's why when you go to hospital, you see those really yellow lines, which are oxygen in them.

But for most people, the oxygen concentrated is a lot safer. You could have that in your home and not run any risk. And that works on the same principle, except that the pressures involved are far lower. So, it's not dangerous in any way.

And the trade-off is it doesn't give you all that much oxygen. So, if you want really bad lung damage due to COVID, the maximum that most oxygen, top of the line oxygen concentrators can give you the home use one, or 10 LPM. And someone was telling me that even 10 LPM, you know, won't be enough. If you're in the air, you need 60 liters per minute.

So, those are, you know, moderate infections are the only ones that can be taken care of by the... And just to be sure, now, in these at-home oxygen concentrators, what do they concentrate? They just take in air like air present. They push it through something known as zeolite, which is an interesting thing.

It's a stone. It's a ceramic thing. It's porous. And zeolites are designed.

So, zeolites occur naturally, but natural zeolites have a lot of imperfections. So, they actually make that in the lab. So, it's a media. And you pass the air through it, it grabs all the nitrogen, or as much nitrogen as it can hold.

So, the oxygen that comes out is almost, I think, 90 or 95% of the time, better than 90%. And then it sort of just reverses it. So, when one guy is pressurized, the other guy is not pressurized. So, it's releasing its nitrogen and venting it out of the atmosphere.

And then the... that one shuts off. And I get pressurized. So, this is the earlier chamber is now releasing the nitrogen that it grabs.

And it works pretty well. I just realized one difference between all this and the scuba diving tanks I was talking about. The tanks actually have the concentration proportion as a regular air, because you're actually breathing underwater. So, it's still a 21.

In some exceptional case, the oxygen concentration is slightly more with some slightly advanced techniques. There's something called nitrox where the concentration is slightly different. So, you can stay underwater longer. But I just realized that it's not concentrated oxygen you're taking down there.

In which case, it would be made in the next quote. That'll be the same for space. That's what I'm guessing. I don't know what will happen if you have continuously oxygen-rich air that you breathe.

I'm sure that's not good for you. Because, yeah, but I haven't checked that out. I don't know what... Don't also please, Mr.

Keep 21.78. It's good for all. I think. So, oxygen concentrators are actually have been available in India for a long time.

Interestingly, I had got one for my dad who passed away in February. And we gave it out because we didn't need it. Never thought it'd be so bad. I mean, had I known I would have kept it here.

It costs in the vicinity of 50 or 60,000. At the higher end, one can go to more than a lakh, like in a half. And a lot of people are choosing to keep one at home. And some of...

So, I asked one of my doctor friend and he said it won't work. If you really get a bad case of COVID, it won't be usable. Oxygen-contraders are just not going to. So, still, the Indian government has placed an order for some 100,000 concentrators to be supplied to...

Which also looks woefully small. How much does an average oxygen concentrator like, how much do they make for these sort of things? So, if you have a 10 LPM one and somebody is moderately, you know, sort of oxygen-like... Yeah, low.

Then a 10 LPM one can support two patients. Okay. Yeah. But only as long as it's moderate because it becomes critical.

So, this lung damage thing is pretty sudden. And this is what I've sort of understood. One of my close friends suffered from poor. He was absolutely fine.

And he was lucky to be in a hospital at that time, COVID hospital. He had a little bit of lung damage and everything was fine. Now, all of a sudden, he started passing up. And the doctors were alert and they checked his, you know, vital.

And they found that for some reason it had really taken off the reaction. They're cytokines. So, they rushed him. They put him into an ICU.

He was completely attacked from the world because he... The only means of coming is COVID wards have very strict protocols. So, no one can go in and no one can come out. And he says literally the only thing they would tell his family was whether he was alive or not.

That's it. So, the family was panicking everything. But they worked on him for three days and then they brought him back. He says he learned from the doctor later that they lose a lot of patients like that because no matter how much oxygen they pump in, it's not enough.

And the breathing chemistry is blood chemistry is complicated. You breathe in oxygen and you think that that's it. So, if you get enough oxygen, that's not the only thing. You also have to discharge carbon dioxide.

So, if you start a two-way process, it does a carbon dioxide build up in your blood. That itself creates toxicity and you will die from that. So, in the lung area, a lot of the lung is damaged. That process, the removal of carbon dioxide is also a problem.

So, it's not just giving oxygen rich air. So, they have these medical protocols, all that protein, they have drugs, they have techniques or whatever. But still, if it's more than a certain level of damage, there is nothing they can do as of now. Just die.

So, there is a small element of just luck. If you're lucky, you make it. If not, you die. And I see that there are some organizations working on open source designs for oxygen concentrators.

Like, maker's asylum is actually crowdsourcing the development of one. And they're trying to raise 50 lakhs for this and they've made some progress already. And it looks really jugard, but it still looks like. Yeah, so, conceptual is very simple.

The only problem with all conceptually simple things is that for applications like this, you better work. So, you don't want it working for like 30 minutes and then it stops working because then you're dead. So, what is a ventilator? Is it the same thing that is used to administer oxygen or is it?

Ventilator also sources in the air and takes it out. So, there's also a little bit of, yeah. So, that is used to sort of different times. There are invasive ventilators, non-invasive ventilators, ventilators which, for most ventilators, have that.

So, they have a little compressor, little pump inside. You can force air into your lungs, especially for patients. My father had one. And that was because his lungs were, his chest muscles weren't strong enough to make his lungs inflate and deflect.

So, he needed help on that. And there is the oxygen enrichment part of it, which is the supply side, which the ventilator doesn't do. So, you need an enriched oxygen supply and then you need a mechanism to make sure that the lungs are inflate and deflate at the right time. He's interesting you said the supply because, Tony, I don't know if you read yesterday's edition of the Nutgraph, which is a newsletter that the Ken sends, which is about oxygen.

And it also how it's relatively easy to produce, but it's a distribution that's a huge problem. And that's a problem that India is facing right now. It's really not a toxin generation problem. It's a distribution problem.

In fact, it's like Chhattisgarh are actually oxygen positive in the sense that they are producing more oxygen than they need. But the problem is getting the dam stuff from Chhattisgarh to other states or even localities within Chhattisgarh itself that need it. So, it's a distribution problem in India more than a generation problem, which is why, you know, like BMC is trying to build so many oxygen centers so that it's easier to transport and all that. So, the logistics of this are quite interesting and challenging, I guess.

Is that something that's unique to the situation that we're going through right now? Or is it like, oh, this should have been there. Like India famously underspends on medical agreements. So, what little, I know, and this is something which is charged with analytics.

I think people seriously thought that they had COVID had gone away. Just three months ago, no one really saw this coming. Now that the maths crample and it does look like, you know, it will come under control. So, it's not like the Dunesbury picture is also not correct.

It's like the way you and I can just go through most social media sites, you feel that the whole world is going to be crumbling and everyone is going to die and it will be one of those dystopian world where you're the only one who will be able to revitalize. The situation where anything on the floor of the host, so we have to leave it. That's the dystopian part. Yeah.

So, because nothing like the distribution problem is classic. So, you know, pressurize oxygen, liquid oxygen. If you want to convert into a farm which is deliverable to a patient, you need a whole lot of really reliable and sophisticated equipment in between. And that equipment you can't go and buy on Amazon.

It needs to be, and even Amazon is not delivering right now. Do you know who the India's largest producer of medical grade oxygen is right now? I read about this. Yeah.

It's the lines. Yeah. Ariel now produces 11% of India's total production, meeting the list of one in every 10 patients. Okay.

So, clearly. Yeah. And it's similar as equally surprising news. Larry and you were talking about the molecular sieve earlier.

And as well as producing oxygen concentrators, do you know who invented the molecular sieve, which company invented the molecular sieve and started producing the first oxygen concentrators. I'm going to say 3M. It was union carbide. Yeah.

That is irony on steroids. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Union carbide is like other people who really discovered the principle and put it to this use.

Yeah. So, they were among the first creators of that. They invented the molecular sieve and developed the first oxygen concentrator creators. Yeah.

Talking about oxygen and stock. King. That's an interesting thing. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Go for it. There was a company whose share price went up from 10,000 rupees to 25,000 rupees in April, which is called Bombay oxygen cooperation. Oh, yeah.

Oh, that's really good. Right. Nothing to do with oxygen. It is my new investment strategy.

And this has happened before. It's happened in the US also, right? Like some zoom technologies or something. Yeah.

Yeah. The company that was not zoom, the price went up. Yeah. This is, yeah.

This is pretty actually considering the name oxygen has nothing to do with what oxygen actually does. Yeah. So, the company also has nothing to do with it. Yeah.

Good. Well done. Well done. Anything else on this?

That's pretty much everything from me. Yeah. It's topical and I've been curious about how this thing works as well. Now, in one thing we forgot to do during this episode is actually that very fitting profundity that we had.

Oh, yeah. We are going to put in the profundity light at the end of the episode. So, this is something that you had shared earlier and it is a, it's actually very profound as a profundity. Yeah.

Yeah. So, where it's basically the, why are we in style? Yeah. So, we have a bunch of scrambled tiles there with the V blank R blank S, which says only I and you can break the chain off the file.

And there's a deeper profundity in that than if you want to highlight that. So, if you take the word virus, we cannot break the chain. Like only I and you can, but we can. Yeah.

Also, the point being that in this time we need to maintain social distancing so there cannot be a V. That is to be an I and I. This is like so deep. Later than we are looking profundity.

They should totally, yeah, you have to be made a president of whatever. Something. I know. The king of all, what's up, what's up, what's up.

Yeah. Yeah. Realizations have been built on less. No, it's okay.

All right. Wonderful. Thank you for that. And as always, we hope that whoever's listening is staying safe and stay safe, stay oxygenated.

Stay safe. Okay. Bye bye guys. See you next week.

Bye.