It seems that face masks are not going away any time soon, as many countries have decided to adapt their life with the novel coronavirus.
This decision will lead to a further demand on the popular N95 mask mostly used by medical staffs in hospitals, as well as some consumers who prefer it over the traditional mask.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, many countries have suffered from a serious mask shortage, which is expected to aggravate soon as many countries decided to live with the virus. This urged a team of U.S. researchers from the University of California to develop a domestic method to produce hydrogen peroxide and disinfect the N95 masks so they can be reused many times. The researchers announced their findings on Saturday in The Nature Communication journal.
Hydrogen peroxide has recently made headlines as researchers and medical centers around the country have been testing its viability in decontaminating N95 masks to deal with shortages amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
While results so far are promising, some researchers worry that the chemical's poor shelf life could make such decontamination efforts costly. The main problem is that hydrogen peroxide is not stable; it starts breaking down into water and oxygen even before the bottle has been opened. It breaks down even more rapidly once it is exposed to air or light.
In a report published on the university's website, U.C. San Diego nanoengineering professor and lead author Zheng Chen said "You maybe only have just a couple of months to use it before it expires, so you would have to order batches more frequently to keep a fresh supply. And because it decomposes so quickly, shipping and storing it become very expensive."
Chen and colleagues developed a quick, simple and inexpensive method to generate hydrogen peroxide in house using just a small flask, air, an off-the-shelf electrolyte, a catalyst, and electricity.
"Our goal is to create a portable setup that can be simply plugged in so that hospitals, and even households, have a way to generate hydrogen peroxide on demand. No need to ship it, no need to store it, and no rush to use it all before it expires. This could save up to 50 to 70 percent in costs. Another advantage is that the method is less toxic than industrial processes," Chen said. The method is based on a chemical reaction in which one molecule of oxygen combines with two electrons and two protons in an acidic electrolyte solution to produce hydrogen peroxide. This type of reaction is known as the two-electron oxygen reduction reaction, and it is user-friendly because it can produce dilute hydrogen peroxide with the desired concentration on demand.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
