Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => The Environment => Topic started by: Arinece on 21/03/2022 08:55:19
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Many people plant indoor plants at home. Indoor plants grow slowly as that genetics. How much oxygen it can produce compare to trees?
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The oxygen produced by houseplants is trivial.
But they still make nice decorations.
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The oxygen produced by houseplants is trivial.
Not to the plant!
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Minisculey, the air changes in houses a number of times an hour, it gets rid of moisture in the air, prevents damp, does get rid of germs and gives you oxygen to breathe. The air on a plane is not endlessly recycled but changed as a 5 hour flight from Newyork would end up suffocating the passengers.
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It's unlikely that a houseplant would produce enough oxygen to significantly increase the amount of available oxygen in a house.
However, it's possible that houseplants could, in some situations, provide a significant (significant meaning measurable, not necessarily useful) decrease in carbon dioxide concentrations in a house.
Imagine a small airtight room with a volume of 27m3. At atmospheric pressure and it would contain roughly 20% oxygen (5400 L O2 = 240 moles of O2 = 7700 g of O2). If the air inside were 400 ppm CO2 (10.8 L CO2 = 0.482 moles of CO2 = 21.2 g of CO2)
A typical human would exhale about 1000 g of CO2 per day (removing about 730 g of O2). So if the room were totally air-tight, and there was no plant inside, the oxygen would decrease from 7700 g to 6970 g (from 20% to 18.1%, which wouldn't be great—this is why we don't typically live in airtight rooms!) On the other hand, the CO2 would increase from 21.2 g to 1020 g (from 400 ppm or 0.04% to 1.9%—again, not great, but a much more significant change!) A plant (or group of plants) with access to sunlight and water could easily scrub this amount of CO2 each day, an convert it back into O2 (though, I think there would only just be enough space for one human and all those plants in that small room!)
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It's unlikely that a houseplant would produce enough oxygen to significantly increase the amount of available oxygen in a house.
However, it's possible that houseplants could, in some situations, provide a significant (significant meaning measurable, not necessarily useful) decrease in carbon dioxide concentrations in a house.
Imagine a small airtight room with a volume of 27m3. At atmospheric pressure and it would contain roughly 20% oxygen (5400 L O2 = 240 moles of O2 = 7700 g of O2). If the air inside were 400 ppm CO2 (10.8 L CO2 = 0.482 moles of CO2 = 21.2 g of CO2)
So if the room were totally air-tight, and there was no plant inside, the oxygen would decrease from 7700 g to 6970 g (from 20% to 18.1%, which wouldn't be great—this is why we don't typically live in airtight rooms!)
This would be like living at altitude.
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It's unlikely that a houseplant would produce enough oxygen to significantly increase the amount of available oxygen in a house.
However, it's possible that houseplants could, in some situations, provide a significant (significant meaning measurable, not necessarily useful) decrease in carbon dioxide concentrations in a house.
Imagine a small airtight room with a volume of 27m3. At atmospheric pressure and it would contain roughly 20% oxygen (5400 L O2 = 240 moles of O2 = 7700 g of O2). If the air inside were 400 ppm CO2 (10.8 L CO2 = 0.482 moles of CO2 = 21.2 g of CO2)
So if the room were totally air-tight, and there was no plant inside, the oxygen would decrease from 7700 g to 6970 g (from 20% to 18.1%, which wouldn't be great—this is why we don't typically live in airtight rooms!)
This would be like living at altitude.
For the first day or two.
Under these conditions, within a few days, the pressure of available oxygen would drop enough that even the best trained mountaineers or pilots would pass out and die of hypoxia. That's assuming the buildup of CO2 doesn't get them first!
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I think the bigger the tree, the capacity of producing the oxygen will also be bigger. It also depends upon the leaf it has on the branches because this is how they do the photosynthesis and produce their food.