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Breathe Under Water Without Oxygen Tanks
Charlie Paglee writes "An Israeli inventor has developed a way for divers to breathe underwater without cumbersome oxygen tanks. His apparatus makes use of the air that is dissolved in water like the gills of a fish. With patents in Europe and the USA how long will it take for someone to use this to swim the English Channel underwater?"
What you have apparently neglected to consider is that the reason that "the bends" are an issue is that it is difficult to carry enough O2 to decompress on the way up.
If you had essentially unlimited O2, then you could stay deeper for longer, and do proper decompression on the way up.
As for the pressure, the air is dissolved in the water, and hence is *already* at the same pressure as the water itself. No additional pressurization necessary.
This is an invention. It is innovative, it solves a real problem, provides real value, and prior to this, did not exist. This is the kind of work that deserves patent protection. When I compare this to say, the genius behind Amazon's "one-click" patent, I find it quite humorous. There's NO COMPARISON.
Put it on the list of technologies being limited by the fact that advnaces in batteries aren't occuring as fast as the technology relying on them.
Rebreathers have essentially three parts.
1) The gas store/s. This is the bottles of gas used to top up the system as the oxygen levels become depleted. This gas can be air, pure oxygen, nitrox (basically air with a larger percentage of oxygen added to it), trimix (a specialised mixture of nitrogen, oxygen and helium) or heliox (oxygen/heium mixture).
2) The scrubber. This canister is scrubs out any carbon dioxide exhaled by the diver.
2) The airbag (sometime refered to as a lung). This stores the air being scrubbed in a bag at ambient pressure, which is all that is required to be able to physically breathe. As the diver descends, the air in the airbag compresses and gets topped up from the gas bottles. As the dive surfaces, the air expands and an over inflation valve releases the excess gas.
As always it is way more complicated than what I described, depending on whether you are talking closed circuit or semi-closed circuit kit - but that is the basics.
Oh yeah,
I think these also have trouble delivering at any significant pressure, thus the low-depth limitations.
Not quite - as I mentioned the gas in the air bladder is at ambient - what limits depth with semi-closed circuit rebreathers (which are far more prevalent) is that the oxygen content is usually much higher than normal air. Oxygen becomes significantly toxic at a partial pressure of 1.6 ATM, which occurs at ~ 66m (220ft) breathing air or just 6m (20ft) with pure oxygen.