Read A. Marorni, et al. The Speed of Ascent Dilemma: "instant speed of ascent" or "time to surface" -- which one really matters?
You can get it from DAN.
This study was done by Dan-Uwatec Diving Safety Lab.
A crude summary is that instantaneous speed of ascent doesn't matter much, but total time to surface, and how much overpressure you generate in the leading tissues is what counts.
A cruder summary is that a high rate of ascent won't hurt you directly, but if you continue it until you are too shallow, then you are going to get bent.
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Other studies by same group found that there was no correlation between a diver having high levels of post-dive doppler bubbles and the fractional speed of ascent at any given time of the ascent. Those studies concluded that what you should do is to keep the computed values of PvenN2 (nitrogen venous partial pressure) less than 1100mbar; and the leading tissue group N2 pressure less than 80% of the Buehlmann M-values.
A crude translation of that gibberish is that deep stops work well, even if you move from depth up to your first deep stop rather rapidly.
100fpm is really moving, though, making it easy to overshoot when going, for example, from 130' up to a stop depth of 50 or 60'. Using a more reasonable 60fpm up to 100' wouldn't add much tissue loading, nor would 30fpm from 100' up to stop at 50'.
Clearly, these are just my thoughts, and you should do research on your own before trying out things.
Charlie
