[FRIAM] End most covid transmission?

[David Eric Smith]

Nick and all, hi,

This will be completely un-useful and un-actionable to anybody, but the way you phrased your question is interesting anyway.

When there was a push to develop fuel cells with polymer membranes, to get away from platinum-palladium catalysts, one of the problems was that they needed a membrane that would be proton-donating (so, functioning as an acid by the Bronsted definition).  There was a heavy raft of work for perhaps a decade (maybe much longer) on polymer materials that have very acidic side-chains.  I don’t know how anything like that behaves if it is out under air, rather than in a fluid environment.  But if viruses are not dry, and are hosted in small droplets for a time, perhaps that distinction is less relevant.

In any case, considering that the glove industry is probably entirely predicated on reducing unit cost, and that I have no idea what the elasticity may be of fuel cell membrane polymers, they probably will not be glove material anytime soon.  I haven’t even looked at that literature for, what, maybe 15 years (?).  So I have no idea what the state of development is now.

Eric. 

> On Jun 23, 2020, at 3:38 AM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Any materials experts out there? 
>  
> Ok, so.  We know that most covid transmission is hand to face and we know that the virus is highly vulnerable to acids and some other substances.  Is it not possible to design gloves (and perhaps masks) with those substances embedded?  How about cloth gloves dunked in vinegar and hung out to dry before wearing?  Is vinegar still acid when it’s dry?  
>  
> Yeah.  I know.  Dumb.  But somebody explain to me why. 
>  
> N
>  
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
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