Amid India’s race against time to generate more oxygen for gasping COVID patients, IIT-Bombay has successfully demonstrated the conversion of a nitrogen generator to an oxygen generator. With this concept, several nitrogen plants can be repurposed to produce oxygen in a short span of time.

Prof Milind Atrey, Dean (R&D), who also specialises in Cryogenic Engineering along with Tata Consulting Engineers (TCE) fined-tuned a pressure swing adsorption (PSA) nitrogen unit to produce oxygen by changing the molecular sieves from carbon to zeolite. India has several of these plants that suck in nitrogen from the air. “Therefore, each of them [nitrogen units] has the potential of being converted to an oxygen generator to tide over the current emergency,” said IIT-B in a release on Thursday.