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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but what do those radicals do to human tissue? Ozone isn't all that great for your lungs.

Not the point. The idea is that you can quickly sterelize a room buy pumping the stuff then flushing it. It opens the possibility of regular automatic ER cleaning without the need for human intervention and error, plus faster.

Okay, so you sterilize the air and then pump the sterilized air out. Where do you want to get the air to replace that air with?

What good is sterilizing the air if you've got to replace the air after you've sterilized it because it's contaminated with ozone? Is this just a case of not wanting to vent air with more parasites than the atmosphere outside the ER?

Ozone has a half-life of a few hours to a few days, depending on temperature and airflow, so the problem eventually solves itself.

Not if you're using it after every procedure.

- You can use catalysts - you can pump outside air and exhaust the ozone to the outside (creates smog though)

The question is more : does it sterilize surfaces well ? The air is not the most important in the ER.

That's not what they were studying. The title of the study linked in the article is, "Inactivation of airborne viruses using a packed bed non-thermal plasma reactor".

If it's great at destroying viruses, it's probably great at damaging human tissue as well.

but if it doesn't stick around for a long time, that's very useful!

I believe the idea is that the plasma never leaves the filter.

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