How do ozone machine get rid of odors and why is it dangerous to use without property PPE?
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Oxygen is a *very* grabby element. It wants to hold onto electrons very tightly, which is why it forms very strong bonds with things like carbon. Oxygen essentially can’t exist on its own, it’s too reactive. So, oxygen in the air is mostly in the form O2, where two oxygen atoms are sharing their electrons with each other. However, it really *doesn’t* like sharing its electrons with other oxygen atoms, because they all want to grab the electrons, like a game of tug of war.
So when you put *three* oxygen atoms together (ozone, O3) they **really** don’t want to share, even a little bit. They’ll share with O2 well enough but a third oxygen atom just is not welcome to that party. As soon as the ozone comes into contact with anything else, one of the oxygen atoms will pop off and grab onto that other thing, hard. Oxygen grabs harder than almost any other element, so if the oxygen grabs onto an atom, the atom may have to let go of an atom that it was holding. In this way, the “lone” single oxygen atom tears apart other molecules. If that molecule is a smelly odor-causing molecule, it gets torn up and probably doesn’t cause an odor anymore.
If you just have a bunch of O2, that will still kind of happen but it takes a little more energy to get the two oxygen atoms to fall apart. Even if they don’t like sharing, if one oxygen atom leaves, the other would be alone which is too unstable, so they tend to stay together unless both of them get bind to new atoms. If you have a bunch of free oxygen atoms, they will immediate react with each other and pair up, or react to whatever you’re trying to hold them in an burn/explode. Ozone splits that difference – stable enough to carry around that extra oxygen that can react to things, but not so unstable that it reacts before it has a chance to get there.
It’s dangerous because ozone doesn’t particularly care what it’s reacting with. If it gets in your lungs, it’ll do the same thing to all the molecules in your lungs that it will do to odor molecules in the air. If it gets into your blood, it’ll do the same thing to molecules in your blood. It’s just not a great thing to get in your body. It’s fine if the levels in the air are low enough – after all, as long as it’s reacting to stuff in the air then it’s destroying itself before much of it can get to you. If the levels get too high, though, enough of it will survive long enough to get to you, and then you have a problem.
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