Fact check: Should oxygen concentrators be used ‘only’ in closed rooms?

New Delhi, May 06: A post by actor Sonu Sood advising people using oxygen concentrators to keep doors and windows open has gone viral.

In his post he said," people who are using oxygen concentrators please keep your doors/windows open as it extracts from open air. Closed doors/windows with an AC on is not advisable. Stay safe. Always there for you.

This claim made by the actor is not correct. Pulmonologists say that a well ventilated room is advisable for COVID-19 patients. However there is no such advisory for using an oxygen concentrator.

Director of AIIMS, Dr Randeep Guleria said that it extracts oxygen from the air it sucks in and absorbs nitrogen. Rooms have enough ventilation and air. He also said that chronic lung patients have been using concentrators for more than a decade with no such problem.

This manual also does not have any such caution against the using the concentrator in a closed door and air-conditioned room.

"There is never a danger of depleting the oxygen in a room when you use your oxygen concentrator," says this manual.

Oxygen can also be produced non-cryogenically, in gaseous form, using selective adsorption. This method leverages the property that under high pressure, gases tend to be attracted to solid surfaces.

The higher the pressure, the more the adsorption of gas.

If a gas mixture such as air is passed under pressure through a vessel containing an adsorbent bed of 'zeolite' that attracts nitrogen more strongly than oxygen, a part or all of the nitrogen will stay in the bed, and the gas exiting the vessel will be richer in oxygen, relative to the mixture entering the vessel.

Hospitals can also opt for on-site generation of oxygen by this method, where oxygen is produced from ambient air by concentrating it. Producing oxygen near hospitals has the additional advantage of eliminating need for transportation.

In addition to the above sources of medical oxygen, there are also portable oxygen generators known as Oxygen Concentrators that can be used at home, the government said in an explainer.

An oxygen concentrator consists of a compressor and a sieve bed filter and the former squeezes the atmospheric air and also adjusts the pressure at which it is delivered. The sieve bed is made of a material called Zeolite that separates the nitrogen. There are two sieve beds that work to release oxygen into the tank that is connected to the cannula as well as release the separated nitrogen and form a continuous loop that keeps producing fresh oxygen.