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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 happens when you hit a patch of oxygen poor water? Better have some reserve oxygen in the design just in case.
Looks like your really trading an oxygen limit for a battery limit.
A centrifuge. Ah, wonder what the trade off is between swimming with a heavy tank and swimming with a spinning mass are like. Hope the moment of inertia isn't too big.
Wonder what other gasses you'll be collecting from the ocean along with your oxygen. Might not want to use this baby around any volcanic vents and such.
You don't really have to worry about the divers breathing pure oxygen. They won't be. They'll be breating a mix similar to air.
The process of lowering the pressure around the seawater will lead to the release of all disolved gasses, not just oxygen. I didn't notice anything about a co2 scrubber, so I think its safe to say that the inhaled gasses will be similar in content to whatever is disolved in the ocean.
At atmospheric level, air is: ~73% nitrogen, ~23% oxygen, ~2% carbon dioxide, ~2% other, if I recall correctly, and I don't think that the solubility constants are signifigantly different in salt water to throw off those percentages that much. If anything its probably less rich in oxygen and more carbon dioxide enriched at greater depths due to marine life respiration.
With a system like this, it might even be possible to remove some of the nitrogen from the breathing mix with a second step. This would allow unlimited dive times without the nitrogen buildup that results in the bends if you stay down too long.