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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."
Revolutionary 3D render, more like.
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.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
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. . . .
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
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.
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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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
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'm pretty sure Mary said the same to Jesus...when he was 14 years old. It probably didn't mean the same thing back then.
Hey, that had to be a rough time for him. A teenager that can turn water to wine is automatically banned from all swim meets... nothing funnier than seeing the whole team floundering about in 40,000 gallons of chardonnay!
Being disqualified from the Science Fair for telling people that God was your Dad... and then bringing corpses back to life as proof.
Asking Joseph if you can borrow the camel for junior prom and being told to "Go ask your REAL Dad!"
No, not an easy time at all...
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