Plexiglass and Oxygen
Download the PDF
Shortages of these two materials over the past few months (see links
below)---what do they have in common? They are both related to the
current COVID-19 crisis, but in what way? Plexiglass has been used for
years in the industrial and arts area for years, primarily as a
"construction" material. But is also a relatively inexpensive
transparent material that can be cut and formed in many different
ways. In the case of virus transmission in public places, it is
finding wide use as a transparent physical barrier and this "new"
function has begun to cause shortages. If you are the marketing
manager for a company that manufactures this type of plastic material,
were you thinking about the "transparent barrier" FUNCTION of this
material? Did you recognize this opportunity right after the virus
began to spread or did you wait to get a phone call from someone with
an inquiry about a new use? We are all familiar with oxygen. We breath
it and need it to survive, but it's only 21% of the air we breathe.
The rest is nitrogen. Oxygen is a resource needed to sustain a fire
and in the industrial world, millions of dollars are spent on air
liquefaction plants (and associated transport and storage) to separate
nitrogen and oxygen so that liquid nitrogen can be used as an inert
gas, in many different ways, to prevent fires and explosions which
require the presence of oxygen. In some cases, the purity of the
nitrogen does not need to be 99%+ and polymer membranes can separate
air, under much less severe process conditions, to 90-95% purity. What
happens to the oxygen that was in the air to start with? Most of it is
simply vented to the atmosphere. But what happens when a new virus
appears that requires ventilators using high oxygen content? In some
cases, the oxygen now become more valuable than the nitrogen for which
the process was originally designed, and not enough oxygen is
produced. If you were in this type of business, did you see this
coming right after the COVID news and make process and pricing
adjustments immediately, or were you surprised by a phone call? Think
FUNCTION, not PRODUCT!
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/06/covid-19-demands-intensify-efforts-ease-oxygen-shortages
https://www.wsj.com/articles/plexiglass-to-the-rescue-supplies-run-short-as-covid-barriers-go-up-11592918743