Home oxygen liquification - Thermoacoustics.

[Brian Newman]

http://www.qdrive.com/index.php?id=28

Before everyone starts emailing for quotes, let me share what I have learned so far. Their smallest unit produces about a litre of liquid O2 per day, depending on storage losses, and currently lists for 16 to 20 thousand, depending on options. I am going to invite John Corey (the fellow I have exchanged emails with) to come join the discussion, and I will send him a link to this thread.

[Kool]

Sweet. I would only need to buy a dozen units to produce the minimum amount of liquid we go through....let's see, 12 x $18,000 = $216,000....so it would only cost about as much as my house. I'm in. :)

Seriously, though, thanks for posting the link. I've often wondered if there was a way to produce my own liquid instead of paying to have it delivered.....
I keep thinking about moving toward a generator but wouldn't want to forgo the purity of liquid.

[jr23]

medical tech. If they decided to manufacture for the arts could you imagine how we would be taxed. In the medical fields they get grants and insurance to subsidize these programs. That being said I would love for something like this to come to market and be usable for out needs. Its hard for these company's to make it outside the medical field due to the market that the medical field provides.

[Dom]

Yea it seems like a great thing for medicine but not so much for glass blowing.

[smutboy420]

Get a cold finger.

[Greymatter Glass]

You can make liquid O2 at home. Cold fingers would work but take a lot of LN2 to run if you want LOX..... kinda defeats the point.

There are all sorts of experimental and tried-and-true methods, but they're either expensive, complex, hard to build/tune/run, not widely available, or in most cases all of the above.

If you need more than 500L a day it's worth looking into some of the on-site plants, which START at around $1,000,000 for the equipment, and $250,000 to install.

For home generation, you can get "pure" oxygen (99%+) from a generator, but not from a concentrator. Most people don't know the difference, but all those little re-purposed medical concentrators are doing just that - concentrating. A multi-stage PSA generator from a company like On-Site or OGSI can deliver high purity, but those units typical cost $20,000-100,000... an investment that's actually worth looking into for some shops - but not home garage shops.


...if you really want to play with it you can put acetone and dry ice in a copper tube and get a tiny amount of lox to drip off the end (cold finger). Don't cap it or you'll have a bomb, just let it go....after a while you can start catching droplets of LOX w/ a string magnet and a beaker... fun science experiment, but not really something to run a torch on.


What I've always wondered is could you put a metered amount of LOX into a high pressure cylinder, warm it slightly, and bring it up to 2200psi? never wanted to die that bad... but if it works, then that little acoustic coldfinger could actually work....

-Doug

[smutboy420]

What I've always wondered is could you put a metered amount of LOX into a high pressure cylinder, warm it slightly, and bring it up to 2200psi? never wanted to die that bad... but if it works, then that little acoustic coldfinger could actually work....

That must be possible in theory being some tanks are filled right off of a low pressure liquid threw a air heated expansion manifold. But in essence thats the same thing some liquid goes in the manifold which is like a radiator with a fan moving air over it. and the liquid boils off in to a gas and goes up pressure.

[Greymatter Glass]

yeah, but I'm pretty sure they use a pump to recompress it don't they?

[Brian Newman]

http://www.qdrive.com/index.php?id=34

Anyone here average over a dewar a day?

Edit: the link wasn't working, so you need to navigate there yourselves from the new link.

"CFIC Ships Largest Qdrive Oxygen Liquefier"

[glasspyromania]

The only reason to go with liquid oxy is because yeh can store more in a smaller volume makes for easier transportation.

If yer looking to save money by producing your own oxy it be better just to have a series of high pressure tanks to store the oxy the make more as yeh need it using something from onsite or ogsi