Technology Overview

Ions in Our Atmosphere and the Air that We Breathe

Ions in the air are nature’s way of clean­ing away unnat­ural tox­ins. It is known that within pris­tine, nat­ural envi­ron­ments, envi­ron­ments that are far removed from pop­u­la­tion cen­tres and urban, indus­trial regions, the air is health­ier to the human body. The lev­els of pol­lu­tion are lower and the ions in the air are in nor­mal concentration. What is an air ion? Air ions occur nat­u­rally when an energy source is pre­sented to the atmos­phere, which will have an effect on oth­er­wise non-reactive oxy­gen atoms. Because oxy­gen atoms have sev­eral lay­ers of elec­trons, an energy source can cause an oxy­gen atom to have an elec­tron stripped from it. This hap­pens as a result of water­falls, light­ning storms, ocean surf, and even sunlight.

• Indoor

  Indoors, ions become exhausted from com­bat­ing pol­lu­tants. The prob­lem of pol­lu­tion that affects the ion lev­els in out­door urban areas becomes mag­ni­fied with a lack of a fresh air sup­ply in a closed space. Fur­ther­more, as we strive to become more energy effi­cient in our homes and offices, less ven­ti­la­tion within these spaces com­pounds the already mag­ni­fied prob­lem that indoor envi­ron­ments have with unbal­anced ion levels. The air in these indoor spaces, which, as we have seen, is already extremely unhealthy, is fur­ther degraded with con­t­a­m­i­nants and pol­lu­tants that are cre­ated every­day by the con­struc­tion mate­ri­als that the home or office was built with, as well as, clean­ing prod­ucts, pes­ti­cides, and more. Thus, within indoor envi­ron­ments, the ‘nat­ural,’ healthy ion lev­els required for healthy liv­ing have been reduced to prac­ti­cally non-existent; they have been stripped from the air by our own pollutants.

• Ion­iza­tion

  Ion­iza­tion gen­er­a­tion tech­nol­ogy enables the gen­er­a­tion of the same ions that are pro­duced in nature in a broad range of con­cen­tra­tion — from nat­ural con­cen­tra­tions to those that are thou­sands of times higher. Ion gen­er­a­tion can be either unipo­lar, when only one polar­ity ion is gen­er­ated, or bipo­lar, when ions of both polar­i­ties are gen­er­ated. Unlike unipo­lar ion­iza­tion tech­nol­ogy, which is not lim­ited by any stan­dards, the min­i­mal and max­i­mal ion­iza­tion lev­els, as well as equip­ment require­ments for bipo­lar ion­iza­tion, are deter­mined and reg­u­lated by the industry’s appro­pri­ate stan­dards, ensur­ing a con­sis­tent, qual­ity product.

• Bipo­lar

  One of the most impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tics of a bi-polar ion­izer is the out­put lev­els of dif­fer­ent polar­ity ions (polar­ity coef­fi­cient defined as the ratio between pos­i­tive ion con­cen­tra­tion and neg­a­tive ion con­cen­tra­tion) and con­cen­tra­tion of ozone (O³) being a side effect of the ion gen­er­a­tion process. With bi-polar ion­iza­tion, ozone level becomes an impor­tant issue, since, in fact, the amount of ions gen­er­ated is twice as large as with uni-polar ion­iza­tion devices.