Paul B
Well-Known Member
Aquarium technologies that were originally developed for other industries
We as aquarists use a variety of tools to help us keep a reef tank healthy by either changing waste products of the animals we keep or removing them.
Virtually all of the devices we use were designed for other industries. For instance ozone is a naturally forming gas that is in our atmosphere and helps to protect us from the damaging effects of the ultravilate radiation we get from the sun. It was discovered in 1839 by Christian Friedrich Schönbein
Ozone was originally used to purify drinking water and as a health giving gas. Unfortunately that health idea produced just the opposite effect because the oxidizing effect that we can use to purify certain things will also oxidize us, especially our lungs.
Ozone is formed by lightning and all it is is an oxygen molicule with an extra electron. That extra electron is unstable and doesn't want to stay spinning around that molecule so it tries to escape. It can do that if it contacts another molecule such as something organic. Then as it combines with that other molecule, both are destroyed, or changed into something else. The only waste product is pure oxygen. We use ozone in our skimmers to reduce organics and toxins, including hydrogen sulfides and toxins produced by bacteria or corals to something harmless, or at least less harmful than our original molecule. If I were using a deep sand bed, I would certainly use ozone because of it's hydrogen sulfide removing abilities as hydrogen sulfide is very toxic and "can" be formed in a deep sand bed. If used in a skimmer, that changed molecule is now removed from the tank through oxidation similar to what bleach does. The best part about using ozone is that it works without leaving anything in the water. Very cool stuff.
We make ozone for aquariums in a small ozone generator that just creates electrical sparks in a chamber where air is passing. This ozone infused air is then pumped into a skimmer so that any organic molecule it touches is instantly oxidized. We use it in a skimmer so that the gas is "used up" before it enters the tank as it will also oxidize out fish. Many people run the effluent from their skimmer over carbon to remove any excess carbon. I don't do that but I do run it over a long trough over my tank to be assured there is no ozone remaining. We need to be careful that no "raw" ozone enters our homes. It will damage rubber and anything organic including pictures of your Mother N Law which should "never" be placed near an ozone generator. If used correctly, it is a fantastic gas and I have used it continousely for forty years which virtually assures that I have no Mother N Law pictures in my home.
I mentioned "protein skimmers" above but our protein skimmers actually don't remove proteins and don't skim anything. Their proper name is "Foam Fractionators". They were originally also used in the 1960s for waste water purification and before that in a very similar device called a froth flotation device which was used to seperate valuable ores from less valuable ores. The thing works because hydrophobic particles attach to the surface of bubbles which rise to form a pneumatic (i.e. rising) foam. In this way, relatively hydrophobic particles can be separated from relatively hydrophilic particles. Froth flotation is typically used to separate coal particles from ash or particles of valuable minerals. Do we have to know that? No. We just need to know that skimmers produce foam and as Tarzan and possably a Neanderthal would say "Foam Bad". Then the foam overflowes the reaction tube in the skimmer and is removed. If you live near an ocean beach (and we all should strive for that) you may notice on a particularly rough day, foam on the beach where the waves crash. If we do, find a different beach because that foam comes from pollution as pure water does not produce foam. So skimmers are a really good thing to have in our tanks and if we add ozone to them, they are even better, but resist the temptation to put the ozone bearing hose up your nose to test for it. If you are still on speaking terms, call on an old girlfriend to do that for you.
Actinic lighting. Actinic lighting was originally used when photography was in it's infancy (but they didn't just take pictures of infants) because the film they were using then was not exposed with actinic lights. It was used in darkrooms so the photographer could see while he developed pictures in an other wise pitch dark room. Actinic lighting was also used in hospitals to cure Jaundice in infants. It still is. Sunlight will also cure Jaundice but hospitals frown on putting newborns, especially weak, premature, jaundiced infants on a pidgeon infested roof top to get sunlight. The actinic lighting which is just light with a range of 420 nano meters affects our outer layer of skin forcing us to manufacture vitamin D. This is a good thing and is what babies (and all of us) need as they used to be born ourdoors and run around naked for most of their lives. Most of us do not do that anymore, especially Eskimo's. We aquarists use actinic light in our tanks to make or lighting healthier to our fish and corals. Just as sunlight is healthful to us, it is also healthful to shallow water creatures and the artificial lighting we normally use in our tanks is usually insufficent in the correct spectrum to be of any health benefit to corals. Actinic lighting will cause corals to floress and it will not contribute to algae growth because plants do not use the blue wavelength's of visable light. Now expecially with LEDs we are more interested in the colors of the corals and fish than we are in their health. Well, maybe not more interested, but we tend to like pretty things and get distracted by their beauty. Supermodels come to mind.
Reverse Osmosis is something most of us rely on now as our tap water usually contains all sorts of things we don't want in our tanks or the stuff the water companies use to purify water is fine for us but toxic to aquatic life. Our municipalities use chlorines to kill bacteria but chlorines are bad for the creatures we are trying to keep. Also some tap water comes from deep wells and water in a well gets there by filtering down over thousands of years through layers of minerals, metals, old bicycles, dead racoons, Oldsmobile fenders and Millie Vanilie tapes that we also don't want in our systems. A few years ago I did a water change and almost immediately, my fish started to jump out and my corals wilted. I lost most of my tank that day including an 18 year old cusk eel and a very old mandarin among others. I couldn't figure out what happened until I called out water supplier and was informed that the town just added zinc orthophosphate to the water to control corrosion in the pipes. I am sure it also killed any corals and fish in the pipes.
From that time on I relied on reverse osmosis and resins to purify my water.
Reverse osmosis is commonly used to remove salt from seawater and make it available for drinking. In 1977 Cape Coral, Florida became the first municipality in the United States to use the RO process on a large scale with an initial operating capacity of 3 million gallons per day. By 1985, due to the rapid growth in population of Cape Coral, the city had the largest low pressure reverse osmosis plant in the world, capable of producing 15 million gallons / day. The first reverse osmosis plants were much to slow to be used for much of anything except experimentation.
Reverse osmosis uses a membrane that has pores so tiny that only the small size of a water molocule passes through. It is a little more complicated than that but that is all we need to know. Before reverse osmosis we all used tap water which as I said, had some problems and many of us were un able to keep corals even though they were not even available to us then.
Deonization Resins are used in industry to make pure water for many things including pharmacuticals. Deionization is a chemical process that uses specially manufactured ion-exchange resins, which exchange hydrogen and hydroxide ions for dissolved minerals, and then recombine to form water. DI resins will remove just about everything that is left after we use reverse osmosis and will leave water as pure as it can be and perfect for our purposes. After the water is stripped of it's minerals we can then add only the minerals we want to produce a healthy aquarium.
Another interesting thing abour deonizied water is that it is a poor conductor of electricity so it is used in the semiconductor industry and for washing make up off Supermdels.
We as aquarists use a variety of tools to help us keep a reef tank healthy by either changing waste products of the animals we keep or removing them.
Virtually all of the devices we use were designed for other industries. For instance ozone is a naturally forming gas that is in our atmosphere and helps to protect us from the damaging effects of the ultravilate radiation we get from the sun. It was discovered in 1839 by Christian Friedrich Schönbein
Ozone was originally used to purify drinking water and as a health giving gas. Unfortunately that health idea produced just the opposite effect because the oxidizing effect that we can use to purify certain things will also oxidize us, especially our lungs.
Ozone is formed by lightning and all it is is an oxygen molicule with an extra electron. That extra electron is unstable and doesn't want to stay spinning around that molecule so it tries to escape. It can do that if it contacts another molecule such as something organic. Then as it combines with that other molecule, both are destroyed, or changed into something else. The only waste product is pure oxygen. We use ozone in our skimmers to reduce organics and toxins, including hydrogen sulfides and toxins produced by bacteria or corals to something harmless, or at least less harmful than our original molecule. If I were using a deep sand bed, I would certainly use ozone because of it's hydrogen sulfide removing abilities as hydrogen sulfide is very toxic and "can" be formed in a deep sand bed. If used in a skimmer, that changed molecule is now removed from the tank through oxidation similar to what bleach does. The best part about using ozone is that it works without leaving anything in the water. Very cool stuff.
We make ozone for aquariums in a small ozone generator that just creates electrical sparks in a chamber where air is passing. This ozone infused air is then pumped into a skimmer so that any organic molecule it touches is instantly oxidized. We use it in a skimmer so that the gas is "used up" before it enters the tank as it will also oxidize out fish. Many people run the effluent from their skimmer over carbon to remove any excess carbon. I don't do that but I do run it over a long trough over my tank to be assured there is no ozone remaining. We need to be careful that no "raw" ozone enters our homes. It will damage rubber and anything organic including pictures of your Mother N Law which should "never" be placed near an ozone generator. If used correctly, it is a fantastic gas and I have used it continousely for forty years which virtually assures that I have no Mother N Law pictures in my home.
I mentioned "protein skimmers" above but our protein skimmers actually don't remove proteins and don't skim anything. Their proper name is "Foam Fractionators". They were originally also used in the 1960s for waste water purification and before that in a very similar device called a froth flotation device which was used to seperate valuable ores from less valuable ores. The thing works because hydrophobic particles attach to the surface of bubbles which rise to form a pneumatic (i.e. rising) foam. In this way, relatively hydrophobic particles can be separated from relatively hydrophilic particles. Froth flotation is typically used to separate coal particles from ash or particles of valuable minerals. Do we have to know that? No. We just need to know that skimmers produce foam and as Tarzan and possably a Neanderthal would say "Foam Bad". Then the foam overflowes the reaction tube in the skimmer and is removed. If you live near an ocean beach (and we all should strive for that) you may notice on a particularly rough day, foam on the beach where the waves crash. If we do, find a different beach because that foam comes from pollution as pure water does not produce foam. So skimmers are a really good thing to have in our tanks and if we add ozone to them, they are even better, but resist the temptation to put the ozone bearing hose up your nose to test for it. If you are still on speaking terms, call on an old girlfriend to do that for you.
Actinic lighting. Actinic lighting was originally used when photography was in it's infancy (but they didn't just take pictures of infants) because the film they were using then was not exposed with actinic lights. It was used in darkrooms so the photographer could see while he developed pictures in an other wise pitch dark room. Actinic lighting was also used in hospitals to cure Jaundice in infants. It still is. Sunlight will also cure Jaundice but hospitals frown on putting newborns, especially weak, premature, jaundiced infants on a pidgeon infested roof top to get sunlight. The actinic lighting which is just light with a range of 420 nano meters affects our outer layer of skin forcing us to manufacture vitamin D. This is a good thing and is what babies (and all of us) need as they used to be born ourdoors and run around naked for most of their lives. Most of us do not do that anymore, especially Eskimo's. We aquarists use actinic light in our tanks to make or lighting healthier to our fish and corals. Just as sunlight is healthful to us, it is also healthful to shallow water creatures and the artificial lighting we normally use in our tanks is usually insufficent in the correct spectrum to be of any health benefit to corals. Actinic lighting will cause corals to floress and it will not contribute to algae growth because plants do not use the blue wavelength's of visable light. Now expecially with LEDs we are more interested in the colors of the corals and fish than we are in their health. Well, maybe not more interested, but we tend to like pretty things and get distracted by their beauty. Supermodels come to mind.
Reverse Osmosis is something most of us rely on now as our tap water usually contains all sorts of things we don't want in our tanks or the stuff the water companies use to purify water is fine for us but toxic to aquatic life. Our municipalities use chlorines to kill bacteria but chlorines are bad for the creatures we are trying to keep. Also some tap water comes from deep wells and water in a well gets there by filtering down over thousands of years through layers of minerals, metals, old bicycles, dead racoons, Oldsmobile fenders and Millie Vanilie tapes that we also don't want in our systems. A few years ago I did a water change and almost immediately, my fish started to jump out and my corals wilted. I lost most of my tank that day including an 18 year old cusk eel and a very old mandarin among others. I couldn't figure out what happened until I called out water supplier and was informed that the town just added zinc orthophosphate to the water to control corrosion in the pipes. I am sure it also killed any corals and fish in the pipes.
From that time on I relied on reverse osmosis and resins to purify my water.
Reverse osmosis is commonly used to remove salt from seawater and make it available for drinking. In 1977 Cape Coral, Florida became the first municipality in the United States to use the RO process on a large scale with an initial operating capacity of 3 million gallons per day. By 1985, due to the rapid growth in population of Cape Coral, the city had the largest low pressure reverse osmosis plant in the world, capable of producing 15 million gallons / day. The first reverse osmosis plants were much to slow to be used for much of anything except experimentation.
Reverse osmosis uses a membrane that has pores so tiny that only the small size of a water molocule passes through. It is a little more complicated than that but that is all we need to know. Before reverse osmosis we all used tap water which as I said, had some problems and many of us were un able to keep corals even though they were not even available to us then.
Deonization Resins are used in industry to make pure water for many things including pharmacuticals. Deionization is a chemical process that uses specially manufactured ion-exchange resins, which exchange hydrogen and hydroxide ions for dissolved minerals, and then recombine to form water. DI resins will remove just about everything that is left after we use reverse osmosis and will leave water as pure as it can be and perfect for our purposes. After the water is stripped of it's minerals we can then add only the minerals we want to produce a healthy aquarium.
Another interesting thing abour deonizied water is that it is a poor conductor of electricity so it is used in the semiconductor industry and for washing make up off Supermdels.