A device that lets you breathe underwater without the tanks?

[PRL]

On an email list, SeaJay did some computations on how much water would need to pass through this thing. It would have to be a bunch.

As a rough figure, if seawater is .1% air by volume, then 500 liters would need to be processed every minute to come up with a half liter of air per minute. That would be quite a pump and battery on your back.

The amount of air in seawater is actually much less than that, so the amount of water would have to be much more.

The death blow is the question "Why do submarines use electrolytic oxygen generators if this thing works?"

Not sure at all about the whole thing, but if the O2 was delivered directly into the blood stream wouldn't alot less O2 be needed? I tough that we only use a fraction of the O2 in air, but need the higher ppo because our lungs aren't all that efficient.
I think that we exhale about 18% O2 out of 21% thats only 3% used. That should be equvelant to .03ppo when bypassing the lung at the surface.
Injecting O2 into the blood stream shouldn't be a big problem, but taking CO2 out is another problem.

 

[Kriterian]

They do exist—they are larger than contact lenses; they are more like swimmimg goggle lens that you stick on your eyes—there’s a picture of Jacques Mayol wearing them in his book Homo delphinus, on page 201. They are referred to as “underwater scleral lenses” and were designed for Mayol by a Dr. P. Mosse in 1970.

http://forums.deeperblue.net/archive/index.php/t-1038.html

http://www.otticarocchi.com/inglese/lentiapnea_uk.htm

I don't see how those could work. The reason we can't see underwater is our eyes need an air space to focus properly. If you wear contacts or swim goggles you'll have that air space but it can't be equalized.

 

[Kriterian]

Cool! Mechanical gills. If his calculations of 1kg lithium battery being good enough for 1 hour dive, and if the weight/size of the centrifuge is reasonable, then it could actually be a practical system.

It's probably fake, but if it's not then his Tankless Underwater Breathing System would be TUBA diving.

 

[lairdb]

The death blow is the question "Why do submarines use electrolytic oxygen generators if this thing works?"

Not a valid objection. Most tech on a modern sub, especially non-combat life support, is vintage 1970s technology (for good and valid reasons relating to verifiability and reliability -- I'm not roasting the milspec design process here.)

chicnstu, DiveGolfSki was right:

If you really justed wanted to know if there are more ADVANCED underwater breathing equipment and had cited what you saw on Star Wars and Pokemon as an EXAMPLE (please don't tell me you honestly believe that anything you see in those movies ARE real?), then you would have gotten a lot more serious response.

...but it's too bad so many people made fun of you rather than researching a little and seeing that there is work being done in this area (c.f. the IsraCast article referenced earlier.)

also, it says he has a patent pending in the US. i searched under his name
and found nothing. also did some searches under a number of terms (tankless,
breathing, diver) and found nothing.

of course, this doesn't mean anything. they might not have updated their
database yet or something.

Applications typically publish 18 months after filing, and not all applications publish. (An application with an active interference will typically be held from publishing while the interference is worked out, and anything that gets paperclipped by the national security auditors also gets held for a while.) Even this is a recent change; historically, applications remained confidential until the patent issued.

That said, I had no trouble finding a US application here and EU application crossfiling here and WPO patent here.

Shouldn't that mechanical gill inventor Alon Bodner show up on a Google search, though? I get nothing, not even the original Israeli article. What's up with that?

Google is not the web. Although Google switched to continuous index updating some time back (Google on "google dance" for info) they don't index everything everywhere (they're very well-behaved re. meta tags, for one thing) and they don't index everything visible instantly.

On an email list, SeaJay did some computations on how much water would need to pass through this thing. It would have to be a bunch.

From the application: "12. An apparatus according to claim 11, wherein the pump is adapted to create a flux of water into the apparatus of at least 2000 liters of water per minute."


Granted, many silly and impracticable things have been patented before, but this guy doesn't appear to be a hoax or lunatic, as many seem to have assumed.

 

[PRL]

I think that this topic developed into a brainstorm. IMHO many of the devices talked about here have a good chance of working, but never will. Just like the hovercraft never replaced the car. There is a device that interests me. I saw a watch in development for diabetics that checks the sugar and injects insulin without puncture. I can see with development of more powerful batteries a watch that will filter o2 out of the atmosphere and inject it directly into the body, liberating all people with breathing problems from an O2 tank. The same more powerful batteries might split H2O with electrolisis and inject the O2 into the diver.
There are many people in the diving industry that are working on a good "gill" system, but there are alot more people with alot more money grants and resources in the medical field working on O2 delivery. And I think that medical technology will be modified for the ----> fireman, military, hazmat workers.......... and comercial divers and than will bleed down to rec divers.
About a month ago I've seen an add for an O2 system where people were able to fill their medical O2 tanks at home with an affordable O2 generator (not a storage tank) it was the size of a large suitcase.
Now tell me how many tec divers could use a machine like that. And how many of you have seen one of those devices for sale at a LDC?

The bottom line is that by the time those devices will be matketable, there will be a better option.

BTW: What happens when a diver with one of those gills swims into a dead zone with no O2 dissolved in the water? This might be one of the reasons why subs use electrolysis. Another might be because nuclear subs have the electric power to do it.

 

[Vie]

I don't see how those could work. The reason we can't see underwater is our eyes need an air space to focus properly. If you wear contacts or swim goggles you'll have that air space but it can't be equalized.

Apparently there are two kinds of scleral lenses. Jacques Mayol used a hard prototype on his dives which were custom made for him. I have no idea how they work.

There are also soft lenses now that must be worn with a water-filled mask.

 

[Don Burke]

Not sure at all about the whole thing, but if the O2 was delivered directly into the blood stream wouldn't alot less O2 be needed? I tough that we only use a fraction of the O2 in air, but need the higher ppo because our lungs aren't all that efficient.
I think that we exhale about 18% O2 out of 21% thats only 3% used. That should be equvelant to .03ppo when bypassing the lung at the surface.
Injecting O2 into the blood stream shouldn't be a big problem, but taking CO2 out is another problem.

Good point. Exhalation is something like 17-18% O2.

Figure 4% of what we breather is oxygen consumption, which would divide all of the water numbers by twenty-five if the gas distribution in water was the same as air. Since water takes on CO2 much faster than pretty much anything else, the factor would be somewhat lower.

The result would be a rebreather using the oxygen from the membrane for loop addition.

The flow rates would still have to be pretty high. Far too high for a battery system at the current state of the art.

 

[jonnythan]

Just to note.. if we inspire 21% and expire 18%, it's not 3% used.. it's 14% used

 

[Don Burke]

Not a valid objection. Most tech on a modern sub, especially non-combat life support, is vintage 1970s technology (for good and valid reasons relating to verifiability and reliability -- I'm not roasting the milspec design process here.)

"Reliability" is a good reason to get rid of the oxygen generators. Those things are a maintenance nightmare.

Submarines often have the latest and greatest technology when it works, although you are correct about "most."

From the application: "12. An apparatus according to claim 11, wherein the pump is adapted to create a flux of water into the apparatus of at least 2000 liters of water per minute."

Around here we call that a "jet drive."

but this guy doesn't appear to be a hoax or lunatic, as many seem to have assumed.

Agreed. I just think it has far more problems than he thinks it does.

The guess at the battery tells me he has not made one work off mains power, which would have been one of my early steps.

 

[Don Burke]

Just to note.. if we inspire 21% and expire 18%, it's not 3% used.. it's 14% used

As a percentage of available oxygen, yes.

Since RMV and SAC are referenced to air, using the portion of air actually consumed is a valid way to come up with the amount of oxygen consumed.