Stoichiometry and Kinetics of Hydroxyl Radicals in Air Quality

Abstract— The environmental health that nature offers us every day is closely linked to the sanitization provided by atmospheric chemistry, due to the oxidative processes that occur under the powerful sunlight passing through the clouds and reaching the forests, oceans, and seas, performs the multiple reactions, recombinations, mineralizations, degradations etc. in the atmosphere. It is a chain reaction called Open Air Factor (OAF) that cleans and disinfects the environment in which all living beings live called the biosphere.

There are technologies and elements necessary to be able to imitate nature in this process of environmental sanitization for indoor environments based precisely on the Open Air Factor (OAF), and for this, for a question of safety and efficiency, it is necessary to measure the quantitative proportions or mass ratios of the chemical elements involved and that are involved in this natural chemical reaction, as well as to study the proportion of the various resulting elements and the composition of chemical mixtures of the components.

The comparison of this stoichiometry that nature provides us with similar artificial systems for interiors will give us a vision of how similar the processes and resultants are.

This paper is based on the stoichiometry and kinetics of hydroxyl radicals emitted by a device technologically based on the Open Air Factor (OAF) aimed at controlling indoor air quality.

Specifically, it has been the analysis of the decay of the number of molecules of hydroxyl radicals (OH·) when reacting in the presence of typical air pollutants such as CO2, hydrocarbons and bicarbonate ions. These amounts of hydroxyl radical molecules (OH·) under study, unlike the multiple reactants that exist in Nature, have been generated with only two reactants, hydrogen peroxide and ozone, following current international safety regulations regarding their emissions in the presence of people.