Disinfectants are vital to a healthy, sickness-free world. They are needed in the medical realm, at home to disinfect wounds, for sanitation, and for the treatment of drinking water. One of the most commonly used all-purpose disinfectants is Hydrogen peroxide. You can find it in practically every medicine cabinet in developed countries, but not in underdeveloped ones – which is a big problem that MIT scientists decided to address.
Why is hydrogen peroxide scarce in some parts of the world? The process to make it requires big complex energy-hungry chemical plants and then the final product is weighty to transport. So, to solve the problem of hydrogen peroxide shortage in remote villages, MIT scientists turned to develop a portable method of producing the product. The research has been published in the journal Joule.
Shipping H2O2
What’s so great about hydrogen peroxide anyway? Once it has carried out its sterilizing function, it merely breaks down into plain water! Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is mostly plain water with an extra oxygen atom. Nevertheless, it is highly reactive on its own, so the product you buy in stores has even more water in it. The household formulation commonly sold in stores is 97% water and only 3% H2O2.
Imagine shipping all that water! You can see why it’s so difficult to transport. The loads become extremely heavy, making the product uneconomical to ship. So, why not just send the H2O2? The fact that it is highly reactive makes that option highly unsafe, requiring special shipping procedures even at only 35% H2O2. The reason it is reactive is because of the extra oxygen atom. It is loosely bound and eager to oxidize any other molecules around it – which is what makes the chemical what it is.
Portable Hydrogen Peroxide Production Equipment
Traditional H2O2 production requires methane or natural gas as a source of hydrogen. It gets the hydrogen molecule through a reaction with oxygen in a catalytic process under high heat. The process is not portable, and it is expensive.
The team analyzed the process and broke it down into two separate steps instead of one.
- Step one: Water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen in an electrolyzer using electricity from a renewable source. The hydrogen then binds with a “carrier” molecule called anthroquinone.
- Step two: The pairs relocate into a separate reaction chamber filled with oxygen-rich water. The extra oxygen comes from the air outside. Here the hydrogen atoms bind with the additional oxygen molecules in the water and form hydrogen peroxide. The solo anthroquinone then returns to the other chamber, where it can carry out the cycle again. It can do this multiple times.
Improving The System
The process is fantastic because you can take abundant things that you can source locally, and you use it to make this critical chemical. With just water, air, and electricity, you can make a product that cleans up the environment, is used for sanitation, and improves water quality.
For now, the team has only been able to produce hydrogen peroxide with a low concentration using this method. It is just an initial proof-of-concept unit, but the scientists are in the process of engineering the system further.
