During the COVID pandemic, Maarten van der Elst, TU professor and surgeon at the Reinier de Graaf Gasthuis in Delft, saw first-hand how scarce intensive care beds had become in the Netherlands. Every evening, he and his wife, an anaesthesiologist at Rotterdam’s Erasmus Medical Center, would share their concerns after coming home from work. The hospitals were overcrowded and many patients needed oxygen therapy. There were several options: nasal cannulae, oxygen masks, or intubation. “All options required a lot of industrial oxygen, and we don’t have an infinite supply in the Netherlands,” Van der Elst explains. “Countries like India and England even saw their oxygen supplies dwindle to the point of running out during the pandemic.” Seeing what was happening in the world around them, van der Elst and his wife came up with an idea: What if they found a way to safely extract oxygen from the environment and administer it to patients? He posed this question to the students mechanical engineering who were doing their final bachelor project under his tutelage, exploring the possibilities of building an oxygen device that extracts oxygen from its own surroundings and can be administered non-invasively – while the patient is awake and breathing independently. The first step for the students was to find ways to extract oxygen from one’s surroundings. There are several ways, but a wide array of logistical problems and safety risks complicate matters. The only safe way was to use zeolite-mediated adsorption (a kind of mineral), which is a novel field for the students. Through Google, they accidentally stumble upon ‘zeolite expert’ and TU professor Thijs Vlugt, also affiliated with the Faculty of 3mE. Vlugt has extensive experience with zeolites in industrial projects, and although an oxygen device is not quite his bread and butter, his curiosity got the better of him and he invited the students for a meeting.