Someone on twitter cited the article as proof that ionizers work to clear out viruses like the Coronavirus. Needless to say, I didn’t take this seriously at all and have no intention of buying any ionizer. But I checked the article out of curiosity and it contained the phrase I included in the subject. I read the article on the electronvolt in wikipedia, and I know an electronvolt is used as a measure of mass (and energy, as per Einstein) or several other things in the right context, but not voltage. So the phrase makes no sense to me.
Here’s article and the passage with the phrase.
So is this nonsense, or sense (but garbled), or is it correct and does it actually mean something scientific I know nothing about?
It is pretty garbled. I suspect translation issues and general unfamiliarity with electrical principles. These are primarily physicians, after all.
As you note, an electron-volt is a measure of energy. The 200000eV probably has some kind of meaning, but I have no clue what based on that article.
Also, while it might help, even the article itself does not claim ionizers “clear” the air of influenza but rather can reduce airborne transmission. I don’t have any difficulty believing this actual claim over whatever distorted claims you might see on Twitter.
One electron volt is the energy of putting one electron through a potential change of 1 volt. So maybe their description is a complicated way of saying that the ionizer operates at a voltage of 200,000 volts. Every electron coming off of the electrode would then be energized to 200,000 electron-volts.
The description in the OP is that their system operates with a current flow of less than 80μA. At 200,000 volts, this works out to 16 watts, a pretty reasonable number for a consumer-grade device. It’s not a lot of power, but then this isn’t a machine for boring through solid rock, it’s just ionizing the air to facilitate collection of airborne particulates.
Nah, from their article, the ionizer itself operates at 12V. It’s a commercial device, and probably draws more than a 80μA.
They have a separate collection plate for their measurements that operates at 80μA. Not sure why that’s relevant but it’s there.
That’s where things are nonsensical and/or confusing. They have an ionizer and a separate “collector plate” which is how they’re measuring ionization. They mention the current draw of their measuring device and the voltage supplied to their separate ionizing device. And then the third number, which is the 200000 electron-volts. There’s not really a way to connect these numbers directly.
And this is kind of an odd point of the system of units we’re using, albeit not without reason: Electricity is a flow of charged particles. Charged particles just sitting still aren’t electricity. Therefore, the base unit for “amount of electricity” is the amp, which is a certain amount of charge flowing past a point over the course of a second. The unit for “amount of charge” is the coulomb, which is defined as 1 A s, or one amp times one second.
One coulomb of charge is equivalent to approximately 6.2415090744×10[sup]18[/sup] electrons’ or protons’ worth of charge; that is, the unit doesn’t care about positive versus negative, only magnitude, so if you had alpha particles, or fully-ionized helium-4 atoms (two protons, two neutrons) you’d only need half as many of them to make one coulomb of charge. What a savings!
This is irrelevant. I can design a circuit that has a 12v input and 200KV output. In fact, you can buy such things: stun guns.
The secondary current is 80µA - it has to be that low or the device would melt (80µA * 200KV = 16 Watts). The primary current is more, but the whole device probably doesn’t consume over 50 Watts.
I think everybody is missing the key point - they’re not describing a SINGLE device. They are describing a system with at least TWO devices.
The first is the ionizer itself, which operates at 12V. (ETA: yeah, this is probably what the power brick is supplying - no clue what the current draw is for this one).
The second is the collection plate, which draws 80µA.
If I have a hair dryer and an A/C unit, I’m not going to get very far measuring the voltage on the A/C and current draw of the hair dryer and trying to mix the two somehow.
OVER HERE: Ionizer (12V power supply) ----> charged ions generated
OVER THERE: Collection plate (draws 80µA) ----> captures the charged ions generated OVER HERE
Probably drawing considerably more than 80µA. But that’s the point - we have disjointed numbers measuring different things from different machines plus a bizarre figure that can’t be directly related to either of those.
Also, the collector plate isn’t collecting 80µA. That’s the current draw from the collector plate. It’s collecting ions, and I suppose it could be collecting as much as 80µA, but that’s also not guaranteed.
Sure, we could come up with some kind of plausible way to make these numbers make sense given a lot of assumptions, but why bother?
The GQ response to the OP is that these numbers aren’t necessarily complete nonsense but certainly garbled and still potentially nonsense. At the very least, it’s a poorly written (or translated) section that doesn’t adequately describe the testing setup.