air pollution – Alchohol to remove ozone from air – GWC Mag

Wildfire smoke can be removed by HEPA filters, but not ozone. Ozone is highly toxic. Levels of 0.1ppm are harmful and it has disinfectant properties at only 0.3 ppm. 5ppm is lethal over 4 hours (more toxic than chlorine gas).

Ozone is a powerful oxidizer which reacts with reducing agents such as isopropanol. The reaction products, while not completely benign, are still much less toxic. The most common is propionaldehyde with a permissible 8-hour/day exposure limit of 20 ppm.

Would letting a small amount of rubbing alcohol evaporate into indoor air reduce ozone levels on bad-ozone days? The permissible exposure limit of isoproponal is 400 ppm, and it would probably be best to keep levels below 10% of that value. The odor threshold is 22 ppm (although olfaction can fatigue) so if the concentration is kept near the “smell threshold” (for people who are osmo-competent and upon first entering the room) there would be plenty for the ozone but not enough to cause harm. Diluting it 10:1 would take care of it’s flammability as well.

But are the reaction kinetics fast enough to make a difference? Would the VOC release be enough to worry about in terms of contributing to pollution?

Maybe it would be better to blow air through a bed of polyvinyl alchohol, a non-volatile polymer bearing reducing -OH groups…