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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."
Too good to be true.
So if it actually separates the oxygen what about the hydrogen? That's fuel.
If this is real it's more than just a breathing device, it's a low cost way to separate water into 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Oxygen atom. That is a much more significant breakthrough... then again that's a big IF.
Evidence please.
Revolutionary 3D render, more like.
what a load of old shit - and it's not even april
also, breathing pure oxygen isn't so healty, so i'm wondering how they solve that without an external tank.
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/
Doesn't a pure oxygen supply become toxic if you dive below a certain depth (30 feet if memory serves) that's why most divers use a nitrogen & oxygen mix.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
water isn't 100% H20, hahaha read a book
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.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It doesn't sound like it's separating the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, more extracting dissolved oxygen. Fish do this, so it's within the realms of possibility.
I suppose it would be about oxygen dissolved in water.
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.
Now they just need to show _an actual working system_ and not just CG
Remind me to get investors for a "thinking hat" too
The scaly texture conceals small holes in the material where water is sucked in.
Good thing Ocean water is free of any particulate matter that might clog these tiny little holes.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Designer Jeabyun Yeon has created something great"
He's a designer, that says it all. Nothing to see here.
Perhaps you should read the linked arrticle instead of making a fool of yourself. ... sea water is H2O + dissolved gases. ...
Water is H2O
An artificial gill is used to fetch those gases out of the water.
So: it has nothing to do with your H2O - nitrogen equation.
The question if those "dissolved gases" are similar to air, or if it is indeed relatively pure oxigen and your concern applies, is still open.
Some people here already posted that this is only a concept and the gill is to small to support the needs of a human
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As long as you do not take the Nitrogen and other stuff into your blood system, whatever you take in, you breath out and it keeps in balance. You "just" need to take out CO2 and take in O2.
That is why submarine tanks have O2 and not "air".
I expected better from slashdotters
Chambers inside separate the oxygen and release the liquid
So they separate the oxygen, then release the remaining hydrogen as a liquid?! The implications for overclocking are astounding... a whole new breed of water cooling.
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;
Very good point. Pure oxygen becomes toxic below 6 meters.
Also, looking at TFA and following the links, this looks like premium-class bullshit. No actual science, no pictures of the proposed device (just 3D renderings), this is just science-fiction.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Did anyone notice the poor English throughout the article?
The micro compressor operates through micro battery.
try
The micro compressor operates using a micro battery.
Nothing goes through the battery.
The micro battery is a next-generation technology with a size 30 times smaller than current battery that can quickly charge 1,000 times faster.
try
The micro battery is a next-generation technology with a size 30 times smaller than current battery and can quickly charge 1,000 times faster.
The original sounds like the current batter can charge 1,000 times faster.
I may be jaded but every time I see "Korean scientist" I am skeptical.
The one killer for the device is that we need to empty and re-fill our lungs to breath. There is no re-breather bag in the device to facilitate that and no way to get a proper air mixture from the device.
It is a hoax.
The scaly texture conceals small holes in the material where water is sucked in.
I think the /. editors have been sucked in.
nothing happens, its NOT a product, its a pretty 3D render and a VC bait,
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Of course you can survive with 100% oxygen. The question is, how long can you survive with 100% oxygen.
... you get to dive for the 10 minutes that the "micro-battery" can provide power?
Seriously we go through this every time one of these artificial gills is announced, you need too high a flow rate for a battery to realistically be able to provide power for, so you end up with a system that lasts for far less time than a simple air tank could provide.
Seriously, this is a hoax. It's purely a design concept. Pure oxygen at dive pressures can kill. And there is no guarantee that dissolved gases will NOT be pure oxygen. Or you might be in an oxygen depleted area.
Read the comments on the design website by real divers concerning partial pressure, etc.
http://www.yankodesign.com/2014/01/03/scuba-breath/#comments
Too good to be true.
So if it actually separates the oxygen what about the hydrogen? That's fuel.
If this is real it's more than just a breathing device, it's a low cost way to separate water into 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Oxygen atom. That is a much more significant breakthrough... then again that's a big IF.
Evidence please.
yes because fish always emit bubbles of hydrogen from their gills
There's nitrogen dissolved in the water too.
It's still bogus though. A device like that couldn't pull enough oxygen from the water to sustain a human. Not even close. A functional one would have to be far, far larger.
Maybe it somehow transforms (two H20 + C02) ==> (two O2 + Methane), and you get to breathe the farts? 8^[
If we are going to have impossible inventions then I want oxy-gum
Hey in the Pokemon cartoon they have something like this so they must exist!
Seriously though seeing it on the cartoon for the first time I thought WTF is that, some very small oxygen tank?
Too good to be true.
Not at all:
Using a very small but powerful micro compressor, it compresses oxygen and stores the extracted oxygen in storage tank.
The micro compressor operates through micro battery.
No-one said it was a free lunch.
So if it actually separates the oxygen...
It doesn't. There's plenty of molecular oxygen dissolved in seawater. The fish know.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Apart from the fact that the numbers just don't add up and you'd have to flow enormous amounts of seawater through the device, there are a couple of other problems:
- Breathing pure oxygen is fine at surface pressure, but it quickly becomes toxic when submerged
- You want the rest of your breathing air (21% oxygen or less, as you descend) to be made up of an inertial gas
- Lungs need to inhale and exhale to get the gas exchange in the alveoli to work, so you need a full lung volume of gas available at any time, not just the amount of oxygen required to run your body
- To get rid of CO2, you either have to release gas into the surrounding water, or scrub the CO2 using something such as soda lime
- Apart from the scrubber, you need to have these additional parts for it all to work:
1) some kind of counter-lung to allow for breathing movement
2) some kind of pressurized gas to increase the amount of gas in your lungs/counter-lung to compensate for the compression of it all at depth and to dilute the O2 content of the breathing gas
So, great idea. You have to lug a full rebreather system with you for it all to work, but luckily you can leave the 2 liter oxygen tank at home and use these fantastic gills instead - until the not-yet-invented next-generation battery powering the extremely powerful "Micro-Compressor" runs out of juice.
The only way this could work out to be something useful would be to hook up a major blood vessel to the device, allowing for gas exchange O2 CO2 between the water flow and the blood through the device, bypassing the lungs altogether. As an alternative, fill the lungs with a liquid (as in liquid breathing) and do the gas exchange between the breathing liquid and the water. Less messy that surgery.
A battery that is 1000x better than current technology would be even bigger news.
As others have said the device appears to be extracting dissolved oxygen, using filters that pass the oxygen but not water, so there wouldn't be much hydrogen present.
As it happens though I actually built a prototype electrolytic breathing device in middle school. There's no really cheap way to separate water molecules - at 100% efficiency it requires exactly as much energy as you would get from burning the H2 again, anything else would let you build perpetual motion machines. But with enough power something like electrolysis can be used to fragment the molecules, and it's easy enough to capture the gasses separately. The real problem is that pure oxygen is really nasty stuff at the pressures necessary for you to operate your lungs underwater, so you need to mix it with an inert gas to bring the partial pressure down to safe levels. And it would seem to me a filter process would have similar problems, though perhaps it can also extract other dissolved gasses along with the oxygen. If that's the case though it seems like you would want to monitor the gas mixture very carefully - swimming through a particularly oxygen rich or poor region of water could have nasty effects as your breathe-gas ratios change. Especially since we're not wired to be able to detect oxygen deprivation - only CO2 buildup. So long as our lungs can expel CO2 our first warning of oxygen deprivation is impaired cognitive abilities, which can easily pass unnoticed, followed IIRC by, giddiness and extreme judgement impairment, headache, and death. Oxygen toxicity is even more dangerous, it can cause seizures without any prior warning, resulting in near-certain death given the hostile environment.
You also can't really burn the H2 to recapture any energy, you need oxygen to do that. And you just gave the oxygen to that human you're keeping alive. You could possibly get some reaction going with the waste CO2, but I think there aren't a lot of candidate reactions to actually produce energy, CO2 seems to consistently be one of the end-products of efficient combustion. That leaves any O2 that passed through the diver's lungs unused, which may indeed be more efficient than trying to separate it from the CO2 for re-use, but after factoring in generating electricity from combustion you're talking maybe 30% of whatever percentage of oxygen was left unused, that could easily be such a small percentage of the initial energy that it's not worth considering.
My own red flag was
"- The micro battery is a next-generation technology with a size 30 times smaller than current battery that can quickly charge 1,000 times faster.”
So you're building a life-support device unlike anything seriously attempted before, and you choose to use an unproven next-gen battery system that's dramatically better than anything in use, but not so much dramatically better that hauling around a soda-can sized battery based on tried-and true tech couldn't deliver pretty much the same thing? This thing is, at best, a tech demo. And given the apparent total disregard for oxygen toxicity if it actually exists it's also a death trap.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Has anyone noticed that this product concept isn't actually a SCUBA mask as per the article's title?
nothing happens, its NOT a product, its a pretty 3D render and a VC bait,
Exactly. This is a DESIGNER at work, not a scientist. It's about selling pretty pictures, and interesting ideas, but nothing more.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
I make no comment on idiots posting ignorant tosh when they bloody well should know better if they've ever eg. seen a fish and wondered how it breathes.
But how the fucking hell did this get modded insightful?
I mean, I could understand interesting. After all, morons can be interesting if their stupidity reaches the right sort of rarefied heights. They become a curiosity and we can peer at them through the bars of the cage and be reassured that, no matter what we've done to the world and each other, nature can still have its way and throw up the sort of laughable dunce who really ought to have entered the Darwin award nominations long ago. We can meditate on the extreme tail of any probability distribution that keeps such a person alive for this long and reflect that life is like a box of chocolates.
But insightful? I can only suppose that we are meant to learn that no moderation system is perfect and the award of mod points does not automatically bestow wisdom.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Water is H2O - the air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% other stuff. I don't see 'N' in the H2O equation. Humans cannot survive with pure oxygen. This is bogus.
The "James Bond Mouthpiece" idea is definitely bogus.
However, assuming (for the sake of argument) you could extract oxygen from water in useful quantities, I suppose you could take a rebreather apparatus (which scrubs out the excess CO2 and recycles the nitrogen and unused oxygen) and use your artificial gills to help keep the oxygen levels topped up.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Well besides the fact that when you get a leak somewhere with a tank you still have time left (hopefully) to get to safety (depending on the size of the leak). A problem with the gills results in having no air whatsoever instantly. Dunno, I think I prefer tried and true technology in this case :)
I don't see 'N' in the H2O equation. [...] This is bogus.
Indeed. This is why fish can't possibly exist.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It's not even a demo, as all the pictures are rendered.
I don't think you're going much deeper than that with this thing. The gas from the tank won't be able to keep your lungs open so you won't be able to breath. OK, there is a tank filled with compressed gas, but how much power would that micro compressor get from a tiny battery?
Anyway, the tank could have some N2 in it to start with so the problem could be mitigated.
It doesn't separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. It extracts dissolved oxygen from water.
Too good to be true.
Not at all:
That is to say, there are plenty of reasons why this thing is too good to be true, but GP's complaints are not among them.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
Indeed; fish deal with this by being low metabolism 'cold blooded' creatures. Humans, on the other hand, are mammals with a much higher metabolic rate and correspondingly higher oxygen use to support that.
Every time a sci-fi series has added 'gills' to a human to let them swim underwater I have laughed, the traditional make up for this, three flaps on each side of the neck, would not suffice for a fish.. let alone a human.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Two miniature gas tanks a regulator and a vibrating device would simulate a working third generation underwater breather and would fool a few speculators into handing over the money.
Breathing only oxygen is dangerous. Oxygen is toxic at high pressure.
With the device described here you'd still need a tank with nitrogen or helium and then you're back to having a device similar to a rebreather where you have to carry and mix your own gasses, which is extremely dangerous and even experienced divers get killed by it.
Now this technology is not completely useless and could enhance a rebreather by allowing more bottom time if it can be used to refill the oxygen tank or something on that line.
No, it doesn't split water into hydrogen and oxygen, it supposedly filters out dissolved oxygen. Using a battery that's 30 times smaller than a conventional battery and charges 1,000 times faster. No mention of the means of pressurizing the gas to compensate for increased ambient pressure as the diver goes deeper. Lots of innovation in this product, as soon as they figure out a way to do all these things.
So Dice can make money on the ad impressions that result from the inevitable firestorm of ridicule.
As others have said the device appears to be extracting dissolved oxygen, using filters that pass the oxygen but not water, so there wouldn't be much hydrogen present.
As it happens though I actually built a prototype electrolytic breathing device in middle school. There's no really cheap way to separate water molecules - at 100% efficiency it requires exactly as much energy as you would get from burning the H2 again, anything else would let you build perpetual motion machines. But with enough power something like electrolysis can be used to fragment the molecules, and it's easy enough to capture the gasses separately. The real problem is that pure oxygen is really nasty stuff at the pressures necessary for you to operate your lungs underwater, so you need to mix it with an inert gas to bring the partial pressure down to safe levels. And it would seem to me a filter process would have similar problems, though perhaps it can also extract other dissolved gasses along with the oxygen. If that's the case though it seems like you would want to monitor the gas mixture very carefully - swimming through a particularly oxygen rich or poor region of water could have nasty effects as your breathe-gas ratios change. Especially since we're not wired to be able to detect oxygen deprivation - only CO2 buildup. So long as our lungs can expel CO2 our first warning of oxygen deprivation is impaired cognitive abilities, which can easily pass unnoticed, followed IIRC by, giddiness and extreme judgement impairment, headache, and death. Oxygen toxicity is even more dangerous, it can cause seizures without any prior warning, resulting in near-certain death given the hostile environment.
You also can't really burn the H2 to recapture any energy, you need oxygen to do that. And you just gave the oxygen to that human you're keeping alive. You could possibly get some reaction going with the waste CO2, but I think there aren't a lot of candidate reactions to actually produce energy, CO2 seems to consistently be one of the end-products of efficient combustion. That leaves any O2 that passed through the diver's lungs unused, which may indeed be more efficient than trying to separate it from the CO2 for re-use, but after factoring in generating electricity from combustion you're talking maybe 30% of whatever percentage of oxygen was left unused, that could easily be such a small percentage of the initial energy that it's not worth considering.
My own red flag was
"- The micro battery is a next-generation technology with a size 30 times smaller than current battery that can quickly charge 1,000 times faster.”
So you're building a life-support device unlike anything seriously attempted before, and you choose to use an unproven next-gen battery system that's dramatically better than anything in use, but not so much dramatically better that hauling around a soda-can sized battery based on tried-and true tech couldn't deliver pretty much the same thing? This thing is, at best, a tech demo. And given the apparent total disregard for oxygen toxicity if it actually exists it's also a death trap.
You've provided a lot of evidence here to NOT use this device in certain conditions that I believe everyone is assuming it will be used in.
You're concerns about oxygen rich or poor waterways that a diver would suddenly encounter and the body's inability to detect a drop or rise in levels are obviously valid.
However, a pool builder who might want to put a technician below the surface of pool water for 5 - 15 minutes to work on a repair might not want to pay for the SCUBA training and maintenance. A device like this may prove VERY useful in certain fixed-environment conditions and with reasonable usage limits, and yet everyone is balking at it not turning us into fish. The application here does matter, and who knows where v2.0 will go.
To be honest, I was more pissed about the battery tech. If the battery charges "1,000 times faster", why the hell isn't this tech in my cell phone yet...screw the not-quite-water-breathing thing. Again, application matters, and you'll sell a hell of a lot more cell phone batteries than SCUBA replacements.
Are you so confident that the pool water contains an adequate amount of oxygen? Most aren't significantly aerated, and gasses precipitate out of still water. 5-15 minuets of oxygen starvation could well do serious permanent damage. Not to mention if you're extracting other gasses you'd have to worry about the toxic chlorine gas dissolved in tap water, to say nothing of highly chlorinated pool water - it's safe enough to drink a few glasses of it, but extracting it from hundreds of liters of water per minute and putting it through your lungs? I suspect that's treading into dangerous territory. I'll take a long snorkel myself, thanks. Not exactly easy to breath under 5-10 feet of water, but not much to worry about either, provided you stay down briefly enough that nitrogen narcosis doesn't become an issue.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Why is this marked insightful? Mod this down! Fish gills separate oxygen that's been dissolved in water. They do not separate oxygen from the water molecule!
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Blog-based sources, poor grammar, CG images, and dodgy science apart, one of the sources identifies this as a project from SADI - Samsung Art & Design Institute. http://www.sadi.net/web/eng/home There's no sign of it (or anything) on their website, but it would make sense.
Considering that the "micro compressor" and "micro battery" only exist as nondescript blocks in one CAD rendering, I'd say that it is too good to be true. A "microbattery" not much larger than a CR2032 that's "a next-generation technology with a size 30 times smaller than current battery that can quickly charge 1,000 times faster" no less? I'm suuuuure that I can pick one of those up any day now, just like in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drug store. A micro compressor with the volume of a 9-V battery that can handle oxygen at breathable rates? Yup, I installed one of those in my free energy harvester just yesterday.
I guess a more complicated device ought to be able to mix it with helium properly and extract the CO2. But it might take some time before we ever get to this level of complexity in life support devices without making them too unreliable to bet your life on them in the first place.
Ezekiel 23:20
Haha what are you even talking about? It separates dissolved O2, not chemically bound O2. That is, assuming it works.
Actually, a new, revolutionary "nano" douchebag would be more scientifically feasable than this twaddle.
"So if it actually separates the oxygen what about the hydrogen? That's fuel."
We'll read about that as soon as 20 users try this out in an indoor pool for the first time.
You know, your analysis reminded me - wouldn't this be possibly more suited, at least in initial use, for use on a submarine or underwater structure? I could see it being useful if the overall power demands are less than electrolysis, cheaper, removes need to dispose of relatively large amounts of hydrogen, etc...
THEN you work on miniaturizing it so it can become the next generation of SCUBA.
I don't read AC A human right
I see a continuous stream of BS stories like this in all the blogrolling sites. /.used to filter some of these out, but no longer.
We need to stop reporting art projects as if they are real. For the good of humanity!
These types of devices have existed in the SCUBA community for quite a while -- they are known as rebreathers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather . Usual rebreathers add O2 from an external tank and replenish (as oppose to air/nitrox from a regular scuba tank). This device is supposed to extract o2 from the water using an osmosis type of approach. Should be doable, but I don't know how it could keep up based on the design.
...why not put piezos in the mouthpiece so you can charge the battery with your bite?
Too good to be true.
So if it actually separates the oxygen what about the hydrogen? That's fuel.
If this is real it's more than just a breathing device, it's a low cost way to separate water into 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Oxygen atom. That is a much more significant breakthrough... then again that's a big IF.
Evidence please.
Not only that, you could burn the oxygen and hydrogen and get pure water AND energy out of it.
Somehow I think that whatever this thing is doing, it's not doing what they think it is doing.
But dude, the micro compressor operates through micro battery! Seems legit.
I saw the CG picture and the comment "Designer Jeabyun Yeon has created something great" and promptly stopped reading. Surely, if this was a real breakthrough, the science would be mentioned first and foremost.
Designers typically create pretty things: form over function. I have met plenty of designers who have no clue about the technology that goes into their designs. This is no exception.
The surface area of a fish gill is very large in comparison to their body mass, and in addition much of their energy is expended simply sucking water in over their gills (or simply keeping moving through the water). Scale this up to human mass, and the surface area for gas exchange would have to be massive. On top of this, at any reasonable diving depth, there is so little dissolved oxygen that this device would have to process hundreds of litres of water per minute, and that is assuming it is 100% efficient.
There are other gems too, like the micro battery that stores 30 times the charge of regular batteries and charges 1000 times faster. Umm... if that technology existed, then we certainly wouldn't be seeing it in a SCUBA device first.
This Designer has no clue.... Something that is sadly the case for many designers I have met.
This is worse than vaporware, as the device is a complete fiction and could never hope to work. I feel sad for all the investors suckered in by this....
A ~100% efficient electrolysis setup would require about 20 kJ per minute to get the liter of oxygen you need to breath for a minute. With the ~20% efficiency you get with a typical home made setup, you get about a minute of breathing for each kilogram of lead acid battery, or about 3-4 minutes for each kilogram of lithium ion battery you carry (some extra power would need be needed to compress the gas to pressure). A bleeding edge electrolysis technology could maybe triple that time.
A high quality, 25 kg scuba tank, if it were used to contain only oxygen instead of air or other mixtures, could give you 60 hours of oxygen assuming none is wasted at 1 L / min (same assumption made for electrolysis setup), while a good try at electrolysis would give you 4 hours for the same mass of battery. The battery might be physically smaller, but that also means it won't have the buoyancy of the tank that would have a buoyancy that makes it feel like a 5 kg weight, instead of ~16 kg for the battery.
After looking around the internet a bit, it looks like this is more of a design students wet dream project. His website details how was learning to scuba dive, and he found normal dive equipment 'bulky' and 'difficult to use', So he designed this device. There are no technical specs anywhere to be found only vague references to 'advanced batteries' and whatnot.
Finally, I ended up on a scuba diving board, where a kind soul who actually knew something posted the following (from wikipedia)
Artificial gills (human) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"They are generally thought to be unwieldy and bulky, because of the massive amount of water that would have to be processed to extract enough oxygen to supply an active diver, as an alternative to a scuba set.
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. 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.
These calculations are based on the dissolved oxygen content of water."
Another person noted that these figures are at 100% efficiency, and that is an improbable expectation meaning that the which means this system would have to be able to pull the output of a fire hose through itself. This means that you could probably use the thing to propel yourself through the water at a high rate of speed. Also, I don't want to put a 'revolutionary new battery' with that much potential energy *practically in my mouth*. Now, even if you managed 100% efficiency, and kept the water flow to that 'paltry' 51 gpm, and devised some way to make it not jet you off into the deep, your left with one more problem. The damn thing is electric. And even with the best batteries on the market, your going to get mere minutes of use out of the thing at that size. Compare that to the hours a diver can stay down (with proper mixture and training) and this device is obviously wishful thinking. Well done /. editors, you trolled yourselves.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
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.
I guess nobody read the requirements for that design to be feasible. It clearly states it needs a battery 1000x more powerful than the best available today. This means an energy density 20x that of gasoline.
Unobtainium hydride batteries to the rescue!
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
... My mind remains open, I'd just like to see some independent confirmation that this thing actually works. We see a lot of bogus inventions on the internet. You fake something up in photoshop or some 3d modelling program and then write up some nonsense tech spec sheet for it.
I really want this thing to be real. But... I want it confirmed.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
90 liters of water per minute, at 100% efficiency, at the surface where oxygen is most abundant. So, at 50% efficiency, at 30 feet, yes probably 400 lpm. Minimum 1/4 HP pump and probably more like 4 HP just to handle O2 extraction. From a battery about the size of your cell phone battery? But thats just one of a hundred things wrong with the idea. Its complete BS.
Impossible to breath under 5-10 feet of water
Fixed that for you. You open your throat and your lungs rapidly deflate. I don't know about you but I'm very heavy in water without a lung full of air. Your first natural instinct when your air is sucked out is to release the snorkel and try to breathe in. Heavy, out of breath, and at the bottom of the pool, it's best not to try unless you've got someone on hand to rescue you.
They're sci-fi gills though. They don't need to explain themselves to you.
I'd like an interview with his dog
Wow
such breathing
so wet
If the designer would take pre-order money well then it'd be a hoax.
However, a pool builder who might want to put a technician below the surface of pool water for 5 - 15 minutes to work on a repair might not want to pay for the SCUBA training and maintenance.
I'd look at a snorkel, personally.
This product might also work.
Too good to be true.
So if it actually separates the oxygen what about the hydrogen? That's fuel.
If this is real it's more than just a breathing device, it's a low cost way to separate water into 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Oxygen atom. That is a much more significant breakthrough... then again that's a big IF.
Evidence please.
It is separating the dissolved oxygen in the water, not splitting the water molecules, itself.
Very good point. Pure oxygen becomes toxic below 6 meters.
Also, looking at TFA and following the links, this looks like premium-class bullshit. No actual science, no pictures of the proposed device (just 3D renderings), this is just science-fiction.
While I don't know if the device exists, we've been researching similar techniques since the 60s to help cystic fibrosis patients. The major obstacle I would see is not can the dissolved oxygen in the water be extracted, we already know it can, but can it be extracted fast enough and in enough quantity to enable a person to use it in lieu of a scuba tank?
I concur. That thing exists only as a digital model and renderings of the same. Maybe they did some rapid prototyping and have plastic mockups. It's a bunch of bullshit, in other words. And someone stupid at Slashdot picked it up and went with it. If those people take investments, I consider it an investment scam.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Importantly, if there's little to no dissolved air in the water, there's no air to breathe as there's nothing to extract. Sea conditions that kill fish and other marine life would be just as deadly to someone using this technology.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The idea isn't even all that interesting. It's pure fiction, and it has been rehashed in sci-fi for way, way longer than I am alive. This is downright booooring.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Is anyone else suspicious of this announcement? Every article I can find is very vague on exactly how this is supposed to work. The one article I found that has a hint was it mentioning a filter with pores smaller than a water molecule. This infers they are extracting oxygen dissolved in the water. I wonder how much water one would need to pass through. Fish are cold blooded, and therefore have a lower metabolism than mammals. So we would need to filter a lot more water than a typical fish to make this work.
While I don't know if the device exists,
No video? No photo...? It doesn't exist.
(And there's no way a device that size could filter enough oxygen to supply a human...)
No sig today...
That may sound OK to a non-engineer, but if one is an engineer, then one knows that if you're developing multiple technologies from scratch, all at once, it will be a big project and it will take a long time. Just look at how long, and how many people it took to turn the groundbreaking Gravity Probe B into reality. That is some top-notch, unique engineering, it took dozens of people a half of a century to accomplish.
This mask would need a whole bunch of new technologies: new batteries, new motors, new turbines, water transport with very low friction losses, etc. It may be doable, but unless someone shows me a long string of graduate degrees obtained while this was being worked on, I call it a big fat bullshit.
Engineering - sometimes it's ultra-hard, and most of you have no clue.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
It doesn't sound like it's separating the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, more extracting dissolved oxygen. Fish do this, so it's within the realms of possibility.
It isn't actually doing anything. It doesn't exist.
(and something that size is never going to be able to extract enough air for a human...)
No sig today...
Nope. Those complaints are in fact the very thing. You don't come up with multiple novel technologies out of the blue.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Interesting DESIGN excercise. And we just have to believe that the designer has successfully invented (or has access to ) new batteries that are "30 times smaller" than existing batteries (what does that mean, just smaller or 30x higher density?) that charge 1000 times faster(!) and a new micro compressor and that the device will actually provide a usable amount of oxygen for a diver. Not to mention safety concerns such as Oxygen toxicity and euphoria, or a backup supply if the batteries (or other component) fail. A classic design school exercise where students are unconstrained by the realities of physics and engineering. Look more impressive that the James Bond device for the same purpose albeit not as concealable.
Sweetheart, you're commenting on a fictional device. A pool builder won't want to put anyone underwater with a fictional device as the only means of life support.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Of course you can reform CO2 and water into methane and oxygen, but that still requires a lot of energy. Good thing is: the energy can be thermal. You'd still need a tankful of oxidizer and fuel. Nah, it's much simpler to have a scuba tank with you.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
That was my thought too, but, it should be possible to detect such conditions. The better question is where the threshold is. There may be conditions that fish and marine life would survive where this device may not produce enough air for a human.
I imagine more of a hybrid system where this provides the normal breathing, and a backup tank only for emergency or low oxygen conditions. Even in a condition where it only provides half the oxygen you need, it could still reduce demand on the air tank allowing you to have a smaller tank than you would need otherwise.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
That's what happens when you get a designer running loose without an engineer to rein them in. Usually only stupid shit like this is the end result.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Aww come on, it was in a bond movie, and everything in Bond is true.
There's plenty of molecular oxygen dissolved in seawater. The fish know.
There's sufficient molecular oxygen dissolved in seawater for a fish. Humans have much higher metabolic rates and require a great deal more oxygen...too much for a device like this to supply. The "gills" would either have to be massively larger or they'd have to have a very powerful pump pulling huge quantities of seawater through them. The former is obviously not the case, and the latter would require a much larger battery and pump.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Scuba training costs a few hundred dollars and the equipment doesn't require any more maintenance than anything else. You'd need at least as much training to use this gill thing safely. And if you need only a short period of bottom time, compact air tanks are already available.
http://www.amazon.com/secret-under-sea-gordon-dickson/dp/0590085883/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389883679&sr=8-1&keywords=secret+under+the+sea
Secret Under The Sea, a sci-fi children's book from the early 60's predicted a scuba mask that extracted O2 from ocean water so that people could work for extended periods underwater -- of course in the book, the protagonist lives in a dome-shaped facility at the bottom of the ocean, something we definitely don't have and won't for another 100 years at least.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
That ratio is taken into account in the calculations presented in DeepSeaNews, see above, so the infeasible volume of water needing to be processed remains. Sorry.
Red flags that this is not and probably won't ever be a working thing:
1. "Designer Jeabyun Yeon has created something great". No, Designers don't create things. Engineers create things. This Designer creates with Photoshop and 3DStudio, and his creations are not 'things'.
2. Its on a design blog site. Not a scuba site. Not an engineering site. A design site. I reckon I could troll up a fake thing (collapsible refrigerator, hover table, solar powered sun-tan lamp) and get it posted there if I wanted.
3. Because sharks
A design concept is for something that has a flying chance in hell of being made. This thing is too small even if we had some quite exotic technologies at hand. It's so bogus it's depressing to anyone who hasn't got their head firmly up their ass when it comes to reality of the world we live in.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Sure there's video. Haven't you seen Star Wars: The Phantom Menace? The device is the same thing Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan used to get to the underwater city. So it must be real.
The working prototype is called a scuba rebreather, and the oxygen tank in those rebreathers is not a limitation of any sort. At the current technology level of rebreathers, it simply makes no sense to optimize the source of oxygen. It's like optimizing machine code of an exponential algorithm that runs on Ns in the millions.
For any sort of oxygen-from-the-water system to have a flying chance in hell, we need to improve the rebreather technology first. This guy simply doesn't have a fucking clue about the area he has barged in.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I'm thinking that in situations where it's totally impractical to have something more, like for a special-forces team that needs to go somewhere just under the surface to avoid detection but has no need to go deep, it would probably work quite well.
Who knows? Perhaps that James Bond scuba mouthpiece thing could actually be made to exist someday.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
2 questions come to mine. 1 is, "How Far Down Does This Work?" The other is, "What Does the Goat Say About It?"
it's seperating the disolved oxygen from the water you moron. Same thing the gills on Fish Does. If the water doesn't have enough oxygen, you're going to be in serious trouble but in normal diving (>30m/50f) there's enough oxygen disolved in the water to support a human quite nicely (it's also what causes steel to rust in salt water along with the electrolytic action caused by disimilar metals (Steel/Aluminum) and why ships tend to use zinc anodes.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Once one pulls their head out of their ass and you know, looks at a fucking real rebreather, one realizes that the source of oxygen is not even nearly a problem. There, solved it for you. The majority of comments under this article are just completely depressing because they indicate that most people here firmly believe in fairytales and can't even look out of their window for crying out loud. Don't they teach anything in schools these days??
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The poster was assuming that the device was splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, which it does not do, but (and this was my point) also does not claim to do (unlike the other things it doesn't do, which it doesn't do because it doesn't exist and appears to be nothing more than an artist's fantasy).
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
51 gph is a relatively small fountain pump. I didn't look at the picture but someone said 2x8 tubes. You could easily use a couple tiny 30 gph fountain pumps to exceed that flow rate. The draw would be under 15w (if I remember right from the last time I built a fountain).
The battery to run that for any length of time is going to be bigger than what it seems like they are suggesting here but for perspective your laptop is drawing at least 4x that and will run for a couple hours. So this could go like 8hrs on a battery the size of a laptop.
Here's a nice analysis:
http://deepseanews.com/2014/01/triton-not-dive-or-dive-not-there-is-no-triton/
Basically, it would take processing 24 gallons of water per minute with 100% efficiency (unlikely) to provide a human with enough oxygen. No way can this work as described.
However it might possibly be a start. When humans breath they don't use all the oxygen in the air up. so one could reprocess that air (as rebreathers do) and then supplement that using this device to make a better rebreather.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why did this take so long, it's not rocket surgery (I could be wrong)?
Why does it need a battery? Why not make the wetsuit the gills?
(patent pending, so don't even think about it)
That is not what it claims to do.
Instead, they claim to filter the water, removing dissolved gasses, that include oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, etc. These dissolved gasses are what fish breathe, fish do NOT break down the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
As for the other, non-oxygen gasses dissolved in the water, we need that as well. Trying to breathe pure oxygen is not a good idea.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"Anyway, the tank could have some N2 in it to start with so the problem could be mitigated."
You don't want to be breathing any N2 at depth. Ever heard of the bends.
They used to use a Helium mixture for deep dives, I am not sure what they do these days
As such they were not creating pure 02 and did not have your issues.
Whether they can actually get enough dissolved gasses with a small enough pump is another question.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Never mind that you're replacing a simple tank with something that's way, way more likely to malfunction. Tanks generally either work or blow up. We've got it figured out quite well how not to have them blow up, so they generally just work. I don't even think that mechanical tank failure is worth even talking about in diving. It practically never happens. It's so rare that a whole lot of insurers would be probably very happy to insure you for a whole lot of money just for that possibility, and it would be a cheap policy. They'd think they are stealing from you.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
IIRC, tanks don't leak. It's the fittings and all the other stuff. I can't see a leaking tank that isn't on its way to explode any second now.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
...aren't there lets talk about the fact that apparently there is nothing to hold this thing on to your head other than a mouth piece. So if it would work, which it can't, what if I cough under water, lose my bite on this thing and it falls out of reach. I have a few breaths swim and I drown because I dropped my damn breathing apparatus! It's a stupid design even if it would work!
Instead the object claims to filter out dissolved gasses - oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.
However, as some people have pointed out, the item in question does need an impossible LARGE pump to pull in enough water containing dissolved gasses for a human being to breathe. Or you you could swim along at incredibly dangerous speeds. Either way, it seems unlikely.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Is at least a proven technology...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's not entirely unfeasible, it just means aquaman can bring his friends along on long trips underwater.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
You and I have different definitions of "plenty". Mine involves a human being able to get enough oxygen to breathe as opposed to a fish doing so.
It's not going to improve any in water aspects of special forces. This would have more value on land. Then the scuba gear doesn't have to be stashed (reducing detectability) and can actually be used if another body of water is encountered.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
really?
"Chambers inside separate the oxygen and release the liquid so that you can breath comfortably in the ocean."
if it's breaking down the 2H's and the O, what's the liquid released? liquid hydrogen? (H turns to liquid @ 423.17 F/252.87C.) I don't think so. at those temperatures, you're no longer talking about liquid water.
O2 is dissolved in the water.. which is why there are huge fishkills when algae/bacteria use up all the breathable O2 in the water.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_kill
The most common cause is reduced oxygen in the water, which in turn may be due to factors such as drought, algae bloom, overpopulation, or a sustained increase in water temperature.
sounds like this thing has holes that separate the larger H20 molecules from the smaller o2, a compressor stores the oxygen probably because there's less usable o2 in a lungful of water vs air. ( Using a very small but powerful micro compressor, it compresses oxygen and stores the extracted oxygen in storage tank.)
it's not too good to be true, it's a nano-filtration. fish been doing it for a while.
But then if you read the description, it turns out not to work by splitting water into it's atoms. Does it? It works by extracting solved air from the water, exactly like fish do. Or are you saying that fish are a hoax too?
No, it's not doing what *you* think it's doing. It's not actually cracking water molecules into O2 and H2, it's separating the dissolved oxygen like fish gills. Although of course it's not doing that either because it's some design student's "ooh shiny" render and not actually a real thing, but if it was - that's what it would be doing.
There are no real images of this "product" as it is a design concept, not reality. No science is behind this design, just magic and wishful thinking. It is pretty clear that the distinction has been lost in translation.
It simply isn't big enough to supply enough oxygen to work.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
I can't believe this made it to the front page. Did anybody look at the other stories on that site?
More to the point of the battery is that good why aren't they trying to sell the battery technology. This is a battery that they claim is 30 times smaller, charges 1000 times faster and built well enough to be used as a critical life support system. That market would be far larger than the scuba market and make them far more money. This doesn't pass the sniff test.
Very good point. Pure oxygen becomes toxic below 6 meters.
A simple solution is to start with the air already in the diver's lungs, with will be 80% nitrogen, then recycle it while stripping out the CO2, and adding in the O2 from the "gills". Humans typically inhale 21% O2 and exhale 16% O2. So if you don't recycle the exhaled air, and just vent it instead, you are wasting most of the O2. For deep dives, start with a breath of argon instead of nitrogen.
Or they could... drain the pool.
I call bullshit on this technology too. What would be cooler would be something that you attached to say a port on your body that would take your blood and oxygenate it in the same manner that fish oxygenate their blood and remove the CO2 and then recirculate it back into your blood stream. I'm not sure what your lungs would think of this arrangement. Another idea is to use that technology they showcased in the abyss and use oxygenate that liquid that you then breathe. The issues with that are that your body evolved to breath gas not liquids.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Yup.
Just looking at the design, other than saying "micro" a few times like waving a magic unobtanium wand, they made the impossible into a photoshopped picture.
It's a neat idea, and does have some scientific basis, but it leaves an awful lot to the imagination of the person who made the photos. I guess that's the fun of concept science. Maybe someday someone will make it real.
I did a little searching, and found "Like-A-Fish", which does appear to have something. The wiki page has more details. It requires a 1Kg battery, which lasts for one hour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gills_%28human%29
http://www.likeafish.biz/
So, the whole thing is made from unobtanium and unicorn farts.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Available on store shelves after they invent the 3 core technologies cited, the micro compressor, micro battery, and air/water osmosis membrane. Look for it in 2050.
Why do you want to breathe underwater anyway?
If you want to catch a fish you just cut a hole in the ice
It was the battery reference that convinced me it was bullshit.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Remember the scuba mask from the James Bond movie Thunderball? Sure it still needed O2 tanks but it was positively tiny.
Fortunately most divers take up the sport because we like to look at fish, not because we enjoy bathing in agricultural runoff and/or sewage. Ergo, not a lot of recreational diving in oceanic "dead zones".
"- It extracts oxygen under water through a filter in the form of fine threads with holes smaller than water molecules."
"- The micro battery is a next-generation technology with a size 30 times smaller than current battery that can quickly charge 1,000 times faster.”
*cough, bullshit*
Why not go the extra mile, create a Kickstarter!
We can then use that data to calculate how many rich retards (with some accuracy) exist on planet Earth today. Everyones a winner!
I... um... wow. Just wow.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Really? I could have sworn I had played with long hose snorkels as a kid. 5ft =~ 1/6 atmosphere =~3 psi. Times maybe 1 square foot of abdominal area that needs to flex to breath = ... yeah, that 400lb guy sitting on you is likely to be an issue. Either my math is wrong or my memory faulty. Still there's always the obvious solutions: a rigid or sprung abdominal drysuit to neutralize the ambient pressure, or a simple pressurized snorkel as has been used for diving suits long before SCUBA was developed.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ah, be ey's also talking about a hypothetical, a.k.a fictional poll builder. If a fictional character can't breathe fictional air then poor Mickey and friends are in a world of hurt.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That's a lot of water, I think I heard 24,000 gallons for a21 foot pool. If you're anywhere with water issues, like say California or the south-west, then someone should slap you for even thinking such a thing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Absolutely, and there's people out their working on far more realistic systems for just such a purpose.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Instead of a battery, perhaps they could power it using a tank of compressed air :-P
What hydrogen issue? If you're filtering dissolved gasses there's no hydrogen, and if you're using another technique to actually split water then you would presumably choose one like electrolysis that lets you capture the oxygen separately from the hydrogen, and just let the hydrogen bubble away. Or maybe not - I believe hydrogen is safe to breathe, assuming you can avoid sparks in your lungs, and that would reduce the oxygen partial pressure by 2/3, at least helping to reduce oxygen toxicity.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
CTRL-F p...o...k..e... I was right!
Thanks for the numbers.
Yeah, probably not viable using current battery tech. I wonder how compact you could make a RTG that can deliver enough power? Of course the shielding alone cask would likely make such a thing impractical for personal use. Nuclear subs on the other hand have plenty of extra power available.
As for buoyancy, just how heavy is that weighted belt you have to wear to maintain neutral buoyancy? Then again it's probably a bad idea to combine your ejectable emergency exit device with your life support system...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Nah, *everyone* wants to be CO2, just look how they're burning up to join the club.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If you're not gaining energy from the reformation what exactly would be the point of doing it? You have already separated the H2 and O2, if you don't want to use the H2 as a filler gas then just let it bubble away.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This is a very rough design but it appears to use a semipermeable membrane which allows the O2 which is dissolved in water to pass through but not the H2O molecules. It does not appear to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water.
One other problem not addressed in the very thin "concept" is how it deals with CO2. Most rebreathers scrub the CO2 from exhaled air and then add O2. You do need to get rid of the CO2.
From this page:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-solubility-water-d_639.html
Oxygen dissolved in the Water at atmospheric pressure can be calculated as:
co = (1 atm) 0.21 / (756.7 atm/(mol/litre)) (31.9988 g/mol)
= 0.0089 g/litre
~ 0.0089 g/kg
It looks like humans need about 100 gm/hour of O2 so there may be a fundamental problem here is getting enough O2 out of the water. (100gm/0.0089=11,236 liters of water per hour)
I wouldn't get too excited about seeing this soon (or ever).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
For the sake of argument (and because I like round numbers), let's assume that a diver needs about 1L of oxygen per minute on average. The amount of oxygen in seawater varies by salinity, pressure and temperature. Assuming 35 g/kg salinity (most likely less in costal areas), 2 atmospheres of pressure (equivalent to a diving depth of 10 m) and nice 20 C water, you're looking at an oxygen level of about 11 ml/L. Consequently, you'd need to process 92.59L of sea water each minute to extract 1L of oxygen. Heaven help you as you surface, because skimming along a meter below the surface would require the system to process almost twice as much water. [in fairness, oxygen concentrations increase as the water temperature decreases, but the difference between 20C and 0C water is only about 30%.] So there you have it: Your face-mounted breathing system would be a terrifying water vacuum machine that hovers only inches from your noggin, sucking 1.5L of sea water and gunk per second through a tiny mouth-mounted system. I'll leave someone else to calculate the energy density required of the 5 x 5 cm fuel cell that has to power this magical device...
You're thinking of fission. There is no evidence this device uses fission. They compare it to gills of a fish which extract oxygen and nitrogen from the dissolved gasses in the water.
This is a boring sig
Like-a-fish seems interesting enough, but both that and the unobtanium ignore the basic fact that there is a *hell* of a lot more to breathing underwater than finding the oxygen. You need a large quantity of inert gasses at the correct mixture and relative pressure to carry the oxygen and maintain 'normal' respiration. You either carry it in a tank, or reuse it with a rebreather along with a CO2 scrubber. Anyone thats used a rebreather will testify they are heavy, complex, and relatively dangerous compared to a simple tank. An oxygen supply for the rebreather is the easy part. Any number of superoxide compounds work great. Heck an oxygen candle works fine under water. But whats to be gained by not using a simple oxygen tank?
The like-a-fish thingy tacitly implies this by claiming it has applications in underwater habitats. Yep I can see that. But scuba? No, never, not even close.
(I dove with someone using a rebreather once. When he regained consciousness, I swore I'd never ever trust my life to one.)
((If the Triton thing ever could be built to push 200 lpm with a battery and compressor that small, it would revolutionize underwater propulsion. The savings in swimming energy alone would reduce respiration so dramatically during a dive there wouldnt be much need for the oxygen extraction in the first place!))
This is an art student's concept. It doesn't exist. No technology was created here. http://www.behance.net/Jeabyun
"Anyway, the tank could have some N2 in it to start with so the problem could be mitigated."
You don't want to be breathing any N2 at depth. Ever heard of the bends.
They used to use a Helium mixture for deep dives, I am not sure what they do these days
Outside of specialized mixtures for deep dives (well beyond the usual recreational dive limit of 130 feet), divers breathe either ordinary compressed surface air (80% nitrogen), or nitrox/EAN, which is a mix with increased oxygen content. Interestingly, the increased oxygen in nitrox is not there for its own sake (i.e. with healthy lungs there is no physiological benefit to breathing an increased fraction of oxygen), but rather as a cheap way to displace some of the nitrogen, allowing longer bottom times before having to worry about decompression stops or getting the bends.
Dive organizations love to push nitrox since it is another certification and an upcharge on fills from a dive shop, but in my experience it is used by less than 10% of the divers I have seen.
There are chemical methods to convert hydrogen to power, but they also use oxygen.
I like your analysis of the potential of electrolytic breathing for oxygen generation. I think it could be applied to an under water structure: Create pure oxygen using electrolysis with electricity from the surface, capture the resulting hydrogen and transport it to a power plant on the surface to be re-injected into the power grid and offset your bill, or it could be sold as hydrogen fuel cells for cars. Win-win!
The article didn't work but from reading the blurb above, it doesn't seem it separates the oxygen from hydrogen, but takes the oxygen trapped in the water like fish do. It's not something I've researched but I'm pretty sure fish don't separate the water molecules.
"All in all, it's a cool enough concept, but it is doubtful it will ever make it out the studio and into the water. " is a pull quote from one of the references mentioned at the bottom when Reading The Full Article.
This is a design project, not based on current reality. The Yanko Design web blog has LOTS of great reading... just can't go buy the stuff at Sports Authority yet...
So if it actually separates the oxygen what about the hydrogen? That's fuel.
What it would separate, if it was real, would be the oxygen (gas) that is dissolved in water: not the oxygen atoms that are part of the water molecule. At least this is where gills get their oxygen from: from air dissolved in water.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Snorkel would be too long to breath through. You would need a compressor. I would be worried though about Chlorine gas being extracted by these gills (assuming they were even physically possible to work).
What boosts the air pressure to equalize the water pressure? Part of what the tank system does is increase the air pressure to equalize the water pressure otherwise you'd never be able to take a breath.
They're not electrolysing hydrogen out of the water they're removing the oxygen dissolved in it.
It separates DISSOLVED O2 from the water, it does not split H2O, just like fish do.
Uh, you realize the OP was just a troll, right?
A simple solution is to start with the air already in the diver's lungs, ...
Already done. It is called a rebreather. Notice it needs a volume to breath in and out of.
For deep dives, start with a breath of argon instead of nitrogen.
Already done as well but they use helium instead. The problem with argon is that it can displace oxygen and cause a danger. Helium just makes one talk funny.
I've only done a bit of diving myself, and it was close enough to the surface that I didn't need anything more exotic than a tank. I've luckily (I guess) never used a rebreather. I'll take your word on the excitement of using it. :) Passout games are dangerous in the comfort of your own living room surrounded by pillows. I'm thinking underwater is less than ideal.
In theory, the necessary gases are present in the water. Taking it out of the water, and presenting just what you need in a useable form would be the cool trick.
If the Triton thing ever works out, it'll revolutionize all kinds of technology. It made for some cool pictures though.
The Like-a-fish has a mention of doing something with the DoD, but they couldn't discuss it further. I've seen claims like that in the past from really cool "could maybe work" places, that really turn out to be "We got our 15 minutes of fame! Whoo!"
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The title would imply someone has actually achieved this vs 'designing' it.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
I wasn't commenting on the OP, but on the moderation of the OP. It still has a net moderation score of +3, FFS.
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The dives Ive seen rebreathers used on were the Great Blue Hole and Terneffe Reef in Belize. If you dive, they should both be on your bucket list! And, they are both dives that taunt you with the bottom rows of the recreational dive limits. I spent 7 minutes at 145 feet, where my dive computer gave up beeping warnings at me and just sulked for the remainder of the dive. It was a great opportunity to experience nitrogen narcosis in a fairly well supervised trip. This page here shows the dive profiles; escorted trips dive the south grotto which pushes the 110' limit just getting there. Rebreathers give you a lot more flexibility to explore, with better bottom times.
A problem using Triton here is all the water is anaerobic, there is no oxygen and thus no sea life below the thermocline, and nothing for the Triton or LikeAFish to extract. Conditions like that can happen unexpectedly anywhere on medium depth dives. Thermoclines shift and below them there is little interaction with oxygenated surface water. So Triton et al would presumably just shut down suddenly and without warning or any reserve even during shallow dives. Not good. Carrying a pony bottle would be mandatory.
Thanks for the link on other dissolved gasses. Nitrogen is available then at ~150% by volume of oxygen. Lets make some assumptions: Troton could use the same membrane for both oxygen and nitrogen; that they both extract 50% efficiency. You need 12L to get a breath of O2 but 40L to get the nitrogen. At 15 bpm we're up to 600 lpm to process. at surface pressure. At 60 foot depth thats 3 atmospheres, so 1800 liters per minute! A sump pump at 1/4 HP does about 80 lpm at no head/pressure, so 5 HP if the triton needs no pressure for the membrane, which I guess is does (reverse osmosis needs about 50psi) so we are probably close to 20HP to run it. Thats a gas-burning outboard motor, not a pair of Duracell AA's and a few CC's of motor.
You and I between us have almost assuredly done more real work on the Triton than the clown that "invented" it; a college sophomore with no engineering background except a working knowledge of Solidworks and access to a 3D printer, and a single escorted rec dive to his credit.
In a rebreather system, you need to scrub CO2. Instead of using a finite-life chemical scrubber, you can use the CO2 and water to make methane and oxygen. All of water's *and* CO2's oxygen is returned back into the system that way. Basically, the CO2+H2O process is the only one that doesn't require chemical consumables (other than for an optional chemical thermal energy source). It's the only thing that can, realistically work "infinitely long" only when provided with energy and nothing else. Even if the electrical power has to be provided by a tether, it's still much less cumbersome than having fluids going through the tether.
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Nowhere does it say it is separating water into hydrogen and oxygen. The description is a little misleading.
It is not extracting OXYGEN. It is extracting disolved AIR from the water just like fish do. You can't
breath pure oxygen anyways but you can breath the oxygen/nitrogen air that is naturally disolved in moving water.
I think this is simply working on removing dissolved Oxygen in the water, not electrolisis. To get usable amounts by un burning water, the supplied battery would be way too small.
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I think we've given the whole thing a lot more thought than it was worth. :)
No problem on the gases list. I was curious, that's why I bothered to search it. I had lots of "what if.." and "what about.." on my mind. I knew there should be other gases present. I'm glad I found decent information on it to share.
Ya, his mystery power source would revolutionize the world. Like, cell phones that can run for years on a single charge.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm just amazed nobody mentioned the pressure. A breath brought down from the surface won't get very far at 60 feet.
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Argon is narcotic even at shallow depths.
It's extracting dissolved oxygen not splitting molecules.
Ever heard of oxygen poisoning?
>It's the only thing that can, realistically work "infinitely long" only when provided with energy and nothing else.
Not the only thing. Another technique sometimes used is to supercool the air so that the CO2 precipitates out. I rather doubt either one would wok terribly well in the context of SCUBA gear though.
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I have no idea about these things but, if we have pressure from the water above us. Is it possible to use that for the filter?
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No. The pressure on your body is equal, since youre mostly made of uncompressable water so you dont get crushed by 100 psi at rec depths. All pressures stay pretty balanced except for the 1000PSI in your tank. Thats why more gasses are required for breathing at deeper levels. 2x at 2 atmospheres, 3x at 3 atmospheres. You still inhale maybe a liter but its a compressed liter that would be 3 liters on the surface. Thats why you NEVER hold your breath during an ascent, you 'splode. And it works the other way too, you have to keep filling your buoyancy vest as you descend to compensate for the compression from depth reducing buoyancy, and releasing as you ascend. There is no "less" pressure area or differential for the filter to make use of.
I suppose you could say breathing supplies a differential, but its surprisingly low PSI and no where near the energy required to push the necessary volume of water through. You could contrive some energy harvesting thingy with thanks and turbines that you constantly hyperventilate into, but youre right back to a massive rebreather, except you have to breathe like crazy to power it enough to get basically the output water volume fo a jet boat..
Nice, I forgot about that!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Which isn't to discourage you from going diving, or indeed from using closed-circuit systems where you explicitly or implicitly manage your PP/O2. But don't kid yourself about the inherent hazards of what you're doing.
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Hydrogen-oxygen mix for really deep stuff - 400m plus IIRC. 3% O2 in hydrogen at 400m would be a PP/O2 of 1.2 bar, which is OK, but you'd have cut the O2 back for much deeper work. Shallower work, as you raised the O2, you'd need to dilute with helium to keep below the lower explosive limit of hydrogen-oxygen mixes.
Of course, at those pressures, you can't rely on your ideal gas laws being anything like accurate.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Those tanks were from a "Soda Stream" fizzy-drink maker. Filled with CO2, which is why Bond died a couple of seconds after sucking on that gag.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Xenon is certainly hypnotic at surface conditions. I don't know about argon being narcotic, or hypnotic, or even hallucinogenic at any depth, but I do know that working with it at surface carries no particular hazards (I have to sit through the risk assessments and toolbox talks sometimes, though it's only tangentially involved in my work) . I've heard rumour of a diver who accidentally connected his argon bottle (for suit inflation - it's got a lower thermal conductivity than helium, and is much cheaper) in place of his helium diluent bottle on a trimix rig and got into trouble because off the viscosity of the gas mix as he descended, but no particular reports of mental effects (just suffocation!) ; the wash-up message was "don't do that", but no recommendation against using argon, which I'd have expected if it were significantly mentally affective.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
No, it wouldn't. You'd run into other problems. Your diver needs to eat and drink. With present real-world technologies, we're approaching those limits. Professionals don't really like doing more than an 8 hour dive before going back to the saturation system to dry out - the skin falls apart after just a couple of weeks "in the pot" if you don't dry out, and wiping the shit out of your belly button (it always gets into your belly button, no matter how carefully you fit the diaper) gets old pretty fast. Then there's the HPNS (High Pressure Neurological Syndrome ; good luck knowing what that is, because no-one I've heard of does. But it kills nerves, including in your brain.)
Amateur dives have been going over 12 hours for years. It's getting more common with rebreathers, but it's not news.
If this is anything more than a bullshit design exercise (and I don't think that it is), then it's a solution looking for a problem. Existing rebreather technology provides the dive times, with the necessary system-level redundancy, and the limitations of human physiology are what they are already. (We may not know exactly where those limits are - but that's because finding the limits will inevitably involve exceeding them, which means killing people.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Depth and time are a complex equation, of course. In the early 1990s I had friends doing 4-hour-plus exploration dives up to several kilometres from an air surface and using open circuit air in 200-bar bottles, self staging on the way in. More recent (recreational, extreme) limits are up in the 8-10 hour range, when hypothermia (water temperature ~4 centigrade) and exhaustion are becoming limits.
Of a dozen active members of my SCUBA club, one dives on a KISS rebreather and one has started learning to use a Poseidon Discovery. They're both experienced amateurs divers, but nothing extraordinary. Between the two, they've probably spent less on re-breathers than I did on the car my wife uses to get to and from work.
A real system would certainly need at least one backup system. No-one but a blithering suicidal idiot(*) dives without a backup system, and preferably a backup which is substantially different to their prime system. And it would take decades for these putative membrane systems to prove themselves of comparable reliability to open circuit SCUBA (60-odd years of large scale use), manually-controlled closed circuit rebreathers (80-odd years of use, never large scale), or computer controlled closed circuit rebreathers (approximately 30 years of development, depending on what you consider a "computer" ; going back to Stone's work for NASA at Wakulla in the late 1970s/ early 1980s).
These putative membrane systems will not be entering an empty market place.
And, to be honest, there will be fatalities while people discover different ways to kill themselves with this equipment, and the equipment designers discover unexpected ways for the equipment to kill customers. It's a 2-way street.
(*) Caveat - some extremely good, or wildly overconfident, divers will occasionally do a dive without backup better than "Available Lung Power". I've done it myself, and decided that on a return visit, I simply wouldn't take the diving kit. It's very much a reconnoitre technique.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"