The ability to breathe underwater unencumbered by heavy equipment is a common dream. Unfortunately, it also appears to be a pipe-dream that has hundreds of hopeful underwater explorers shelling out big bucks ($700,000 in just a few days) for a product of dubious design, and the number is growing
.
Several potential methods exist for the development of artificial gills. One proposed method is the use of liquid breathing with a membrane oxygenator to solve the problem of carbon dioxide retention, the major limiting factor in liquid breathing. It is thought that a system such as this would allow for diving without risk of decompression sickness.



Currently raising funds on Indiegogo, the Triton claims to be the world’s first “artificial gills rebreather,” a concept that has eluded the world’s top scientists and military contractors for years. If true, it would revolutionize snorkeling and recreational diving overnight.
Experts say that the Triton’s claims are bold, and implausible, and the company’s lack of third-party verification or industry experience raises red flags.

The consensus: The Triton faces limitations in battery design, high-pressure storage, and filtration that will likely not be overcome for decades.
We’d love for this product to be real. It would change shallow diving forever. If it turns out to be effective, we’ll be eating crow and lining up to buy one after the company claims they’ll be delivered in Dec. 2016 (or as soon as a third party verifies they really work as promised). But for now, we, and many others, are skeptical.

Why ‘Triton’ Can’t Work As Claimed

To understand the difficulty of extracting air from water, you need to go back to middle school chemistry. Water in lakes, oceans, and pools contains air from the atmosphere in solution.
To remove solutions from water while underwater is not an easy task. But we’ll give this startup the benefit of the doubt and allow that they’ve come up with a revolutionary technology that removes 100 percent of dissolved oxygen from water.

Even if this is true (top scientists have struggled to do this for decades), the device will still have to perfectly remove the oxygen from between 46 and 90 or more liters (my calculations) of water every minute to provide enough oxygen for a human to metabolize at rest. With any exertion, that number goes up dramatically. But we’ll settle with “at rest” for starters, because even that would be a world-changing revolution in technology.

Oxygen Extraction From Water Isn’t Easy

Using a standardized table of oxygen solubility, one can derive that fresh water at sea level contains about 9.1 mg/L of oxygen at room temperature (68º F). That’s .0091 grams.
A human adult uses around (conservatively) 617 grams of oxygen per day at rest. That breaks down to .42 grams per minute. This number is highly variable depending on individual metabolism, size, exertion, and more.But for this scenario, if you divide .42 by .0091 you get about 46.1. That’s how many liters of water you’d need to process per minute to provide enough oxygen to support a person at rest.

Needed: Huge Pump, High-Pressure Storage, Revolutionary Battery

My numbers are conservative. Others have debunked the plausibility of this contraption by a much larger margin.
Dr. Alistair Dove, the former associate editor of Deep Sea News, estimated that it would require 90 liters of water per minute — similar to a 1/4 horsepower sump pump — to produce enough oxygen to breathe.
And this is all supposed to be done by a small lithium-ion battery sucking water through a plastic device the size of a snorkel. Plus, that small device also houses a compressor and air tank to store breathing air, and some kind of regulator (which in scuba gear costs over the price of the Triton alone) to change the high-pressure stored air to a breathable pressure.
This remarkable technology — stuff that has never been done at remotely this scale, and that has never been tested or reviewed by any third party — can be yours for just $300 if you believe the pitch.
For reference, a scuba regulator will cost you $400 or more, not including tanks. An entry-level rebreather weighs more than 40 pounds and will cost you $6,000.

Three Major Problems

Dr. Neal Pollock, a research associate at the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology at Duke University Medical Center, and the research director for Divers Alert Network, explained three significant barriers to the artificial “gills” concept.
  1. Extraction Of Oxygen: “You have to both run a lot of water through your product, and have a means to separate it,” Pollock said. “They have some kind of filter system they say works with a membrane. But what entices the oxygen to go through that membrane? The explanation is not compelling.”
  2. Storage: “We breath volumetrically. At the surface, the volume of a breath would be about two liters while exercising (or about .5 liters at rest). So the system needs a reservoir to hold the compressed air. They are claiming this tiny reservoir will hold it, and it will take a very powerful pump.”
  3. Delivery (metering): Somehow, this compressed air needs to be metered; a job that in scuba gear is accomplished by a regulator. At depths beyond 130 feet, or for prolonged dives, a rebreather that mixes oxygen with other gasses like helium and nitrogen is used. That’s because deeper than 15 feet, pure oxygen becomes toxic, so if an untrained user (anyone can buy this product) ventures too deep, they could be poisoned.
“I don’t believe they have a chance of fitting all this into a small device,” Pollock said.

Can you Stay in Underwater without oxygen tank for 45 minutes?? YES

The ability to breathe underwater unencumbered by heavy equipment is a common dream. Unfortunately, it also appears to be a pipe-dream that has hundreds of hopeful underwater explorers shelling out big bucks ($700,000 in just a few days) for a product of dubious design, and the number is growing
.
Several potential methods exist for the development of artificial gills. One proposed method is the use of liquid breathing with a membrane oxygenator to solve the problem of carbon dioxide retention, the major limiting factor in liquid breathing. It is thought that a system such as this would allow for diving without risk of decompression sickness.



Currently raising funds on Indiegogo, the Triton claims to be the world’s first “artificial gills rebreather,” a concept that has eluded the world’s top scientists and military contractors for years. If true, it would revolutionize snorkeling and recreational diving overnight.
Experts say that the Triton’s claims are bold, and implausible, and the company’s lack of third-party verification or industry experience raises red flags.

The consensus: The Triton faces limitations in battery design, high-pressure storage, and filtration that will likely not be overcome for decades.
We’d love for this product to be real. It would change shallow diving forever. If it turns out to be effective, we’ll be eating crow and lining up to buy one after the company claims they’ll be delivered in Dec. 2016 (or as soon as a third party verifies they really work as promised). But for now, we, and many others, are skeptical.

Why ‘Triton’ Can’t Work As Claimed

To understand the difficulty of extracting air from water, you need to go back to middle school chemistry. Water in lakes, oceans, and pools contains air from the atmosphere in solution.
To remove solutions from water while underwater is not an easy task. But we’ll give this startup the benefit of the doubt and allow that they’ve come up with a revolutionary technology that removes 100 percent of dissolved oxygen from water.

Even if this is true (top scientists have struggled to do this for decades), the device will still have to perfectly remove the oxygen from between 46 and 90 or more liters (my calculations) of water every minute to provide enough oxygen for a human to metabolize at rest. With any exertion, that number goes up dramatically. But we’ll settle with “at rest” for starters, because even that would be a world-changing revolution in technology.

Oxygen Extraction From Water Isn’t Easy

Using a standardized table of oxygen solubility, one can derive that fresh water at sea level contains about 9.1 mg/L of oxygen at room temperature (68º F). That’s .0091 grams.
A human adult uses around (conservatively) 617 grams of oxygen per day at rest. That breaks down to .42 grams per minute. This number is highly variable depending on individual metabolism, size, exertion, and more.But for this scenario, if you divide .42 by .0091 you get about 46.1. That’s how many liters of water you’d need to process per minute to provide enough oxygen to support a person at rest.

Needed: Huge Pump, High-Pressure Storage, Revolutionary Battery

My numbers are conservative. Others have debunked the plausibility of this contraption by a much larger margin.
Dr. Alistair Dove, the former associate editor of Deep Sea News, estimated that it would require 90 liters of water per minute — similar to a 1/4 horsepower sump pump — to produce enough oxygen to breathe.
And this is all supposed to be done by a small lithium-ion battery sucking water through a plastic device the size of a snorkel. Plus, that small device also houses a compressor and air tank to store breathing air, and some kind of regulator (which in scuba gear costs over the price of the Triton alone) to change the high-pressure stored air to a breathable pressure.
This remarkable technology — stuff that has never been done at remotely this scale, and that has never been tested or reviewed by any third party — can be yours for just $300 if you believe the pitch.
For reference, a scuba regulator will cost you $400 or more, not including tanks. An entry-level rebreather weighs more than 40 pounds and will cost you $6,000.

Three Major Problems

Dr. Neal Pollock, a research associate at the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology at Duke University Medical Center, and the research director for Divers Alert Network, explained three significant barriers to the artificial “gills” concept.
  1. Extraction Of Oxygen: “You have to both run a lot of water through your product, and have a means to separate it,” Pollock said. “They have some kind of filter system they say works with a membrane. But what entices the oxygen to go through that membrane? The explanation is not compelling.”
  2. Storage: “We breath volumetrically. At the surface, the volume of a breath would be about two liters while exercising (or about .5 liters at rest). So the system needs a reservoir to hold the compressed air. They are claiming this tiny reservoir will hold it, and it will take a very powerful pump.”
  3. Delivery (metering): Somehow, this compressed air needs to be metered; a job that in scuba gear is accomplished by a regulator. At depths beyond 130 feet, or for prolonged dives, a rebreather that mixes oxygen with other gasses like helium and nitrogen is used. That’s because deeper than 15 feet, pure oxygen becomes toxic, so if an untrained user (anyone can buy this product) ventures too deep, they could be poisoned.
“I don’t believe they have a chance of fitting all this into a small device,” Pollock said.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)