Oxygen Generator 2

See the link for a description of an oxygen generator that combines hydrogen with atmospheric oxygen, and then uses electrolysis to separate the pure oxygen.

While the other method will work, there is a significant question regarding its overall energy efficiency. So, the goal here is to consider some other chemical reactions. Just for fun, let's start with the element mercury.

It happens that you can heat mercury in air, and it will form an oxide. It also happens that if you heat the oxide, it will decompose back into mercury and oxygen. That sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Just do the first thing in part of the overall device, move the resulting oxide to another part of the device, and then obtain pure oxygen just by heating (presumably electrically) --and return the mercury to the first part of the device.

Of course that particular system will have a problem in that mercury vaporizes fairly easily, which means the person breathing the oxygen is likely to get poisoned by the mercury. So, what else is there?

It happens that gold oxide also decomposes with heat, and gold is not going to yield dangerous vapors like mercury. But making gold oxide is not a simple task, alas. So, what else is there?

How about natural hemoglobin? This iron compound is such that in the lungs, oxygen latches onto it easily, and elsewhere in the body, oxygen can be removed from it easily (both events at body temperature). I'd stop right here if I knew the stuff was stable enough for what we might call "small scale industrial use", getting shoved around in an endless loop inside a home oxygen generator. But what if it isn't that stable?

So, what I'd like to suggest is some molecular engineering, starting with thinking about the hemoglobin molecule, which is a fairly complex combination of proteins that apparently surround an iron atom in a way that lets it attract oxygen without making a strong chemical bond with the oxygen. Our goal is to build a different container (perhaps something as simple as a buckyball) that can do the same sort of thing, without being vulnerable to such things as bacteria eating hemoglobin. Of course we want it to be nicely stable in terms of thermal and mechanical manipulations, as well.

We might even do the above with some atom other than iron. The mollusc family of organisms uses a copper-based compound ("cyanoglobin") for oxygen transport. And who knows, perhaps if a mercury atom was appropriately surrounded, it could still work, and the weight of the surrounding molecules would keep it from escaping the oxygen generator, and poisoning someone.