An Israeli Inventor has developed a breathing apparatus that will allow breathing underwater without the assistance of compressed air tanks.
This new invention will use the relatively small amounts of air that already exist in water to supply oxygen to both scuba divers and submarines. The invention has already captured the interest of most major diving manufacturers as well as the Israeli Navy.
The idea of breathing underwater without cumbersome compressed air tanks has been the dream of science fiction writers for many years. In George Lucas movie “The Phantom Menace”, Obi-Wan whips out a little Jedi underwater breathing apparatus and dives in.
As things tend to happen in our world, yesterdays science fiction has turned into today’s science fact due to one Israeli inventor with a dream.
There are a number of limitations to the existing compressed air tank underwater breathing method. The first is the amount of time a diver can stay underwater, which is the result of the compressed air tank capacity.
Another limitation is the dependence on compressed air refueling facilities near the diving site which are costly to operate and are used to compress the gas into the tanks which might be dangerous if not handled properly. The final problem has to do with the actual use of compressed air tanks underwater. When these tanks are in use they empty out and change the balance of the diver in the water. Engineers have tried to overcome these limitations for many years now.
Nuclear submarines and the international space station use systems that generate Oxygen from water by performing “Electrolysis”, which is chemical separation of Oxygen from Hydrogen. These systems require very large amounts of energy to operate. For this reason, smaller, diesel fueled submarines cannot use these systems and are required to resurface to re-supply their air tanks every so often. Divers can’t even consider carrying such large machines not to mention supplying them with energy.
To overcome this limitation an Israeli inventor, Alon Bodner, turned to fish. Fish do not perform chemical separation of oxygen from water; instead they use the dissolved air that exists in the water in order to breathe. In the ocean the wind, waves and underwater currents help spread small amounts of air inside the water. Studies have shown that in a depth of 200m below the sea there is still about 1.5% of dissolved air. This might not sound like much but it is enough to allow both small and large fish to breathe comfortably underwater.
Bodner’s idea was to create an artificial system that will mimic the way fish use the air in the water thus allowing both smaller submarines and divers to get rid of the large, cumbersome compressed air tanks. The system developed by Bodner uses a well known physical law called the “Henry Law” which describes gas absorption in liquids. This law states that the amount of gas that can be dissolved in a liquid body is proportional to the pressure on the liquid body. The law works in both directionslowering the pressure will release more gas out of the liquid. This is done by a centrifuge which rotates rapidly thus creating under pressure inside a small sealed chamber containing sea water. The system will be powered by rechargeable batteries. Calculations showed that a one kilo Lithium battery can provide a diver with about one hour of diving time. Bodner has already built and tested a laboratory model and he is on the path to building a full-scale prototype. Patents for the invention have already been granted in Europe and a similar one is currently pending examination in the U.S. Meetings have already been held with most major diving manufacturers as well as with the Israeli Navy. Initial financial support for the project has been given by Israel Ministry of Industry and Commerce and Bodner is currently looking for private investors to help complete his project. If everything goes according to plan, in a few years the new tankless breathing system will be operational and will be attached to a diver in the form of a vest that will enable him to stay underwater for a period of many hours.
Watch flash presentation: way to breath under water without oxygen tanksf .
Cool, than you could be like a fishy.
Yeah, how does one extract oxygen from hydrogen?
Think he meant water. I think it is a typo or a misstatement. On a nuclear submarine they have plenty of electrical power so they use electrolysis to separate
Hydrogen and Oxygen from water. It is rather simple (they do it in basic high school chemistry class all the time), just run a current through water. Best if you
add a little Sulfuric Acid (a drop or two) and DC current will allow you to collect O2 at one electrode and H2 at the other. (water being H2O)
He is stating that his device Does not do electrolisys. Think of soda. How it has co2 in it. Now basically using the soda example his machine would basically
take in the co2 bubbles without taking in the air. So all his machine is doing is taking out the air from the water (not the o2).
Think of his machine as artificial gills.
It is a good idea. However closed scuba systems are not for your usual recreational diver. They are a lot more complex to use, a LOT more training. If you
don’t use closed scuba often you increase your risk. It takes training to use a closed scuba system and a lot more can go wrong. (eg you can’t easily detect
CO2 build up so you have to monitor it. Same with O2 build up. At depth O2 can be toxic to the central nervous system. An accumulation of one or the other
is quite possible in a closed system.) Military uses abound.
So what about the bends? I didn’t read anything about the nitrogen that would build up in the blood.
So why does it look exactly like a snorkle, mask and flippers? Doesn’t this thing work by leaving one end out of the water and sticking the other in your mouth?
Gee. It is a snorkle. I had one as a kid back in the 1940’s.
Electrolysis is the separation of oxygen from hydrogen. Oxygen is bonded to hydrogen in water, and through electolysis, you remove the oxygen from the hydrogen, giving you oxygen and hydrogen. It is not a snorkel. That picture is to illustrate the general topic, numbnuts. Read the article and try to understand it before makin criticisms on a subject you quite obviously know nothing about.
Its still really cool.
Schmidt, your concern about closed diving systems, AKA rebreathers is valid. But you seem to have missed the point that this is not a closed system: it is open at two ends: one end to let the seawater( dissolved air) in, and one end to let the water minus the oxygen out. It’s not clear to me if the used air is just expelled or is recylced. Maybe you could use the same trick with conventional rebreathers to scrub the CO2.
As for that one kilo Lithium battery they are talking about: that is a serious amount of energy. A 60 gram one can hold about 11 WattHours, so 1 kilo can hold about 180 WattHours. That could provide a nice propulsion stream with the exaust water too…
Ok, as the professor said, this vest will not perform electrolysis. That is to day it will NOT separate H20, increase the concentration gradient of both and encourage
O=O bonding. What it will do is quite adequately explained by Ali, if a little muddled. Notice how when you open a can of soda you hear the ‘hiss’ of escaping gas?
Well, why didn’t it burst out before you opened it? The strength of the aluminum? No. It was pressurized, allowing more gas to dissolve into solution. You relieve
that pressure and free the gas. This would do the same, taking in water and relieving the pressure, allowing for consumption.
In the article, the inventor himself says that the system is only really feasible in conjunction with rebreathing aparatus and still needs to pump through about
200 litres of water per minute, and that is still quite a lot (3 litres per second, i.e. on a 10cm cross section pipe, we’re talking about a water jet of about
30cm-40cm a second. Plus you can’t reuse any of the water, so there are a lot of problems invovled. And since we’re using rebreathers, any talk of having
‘just a compact vest’ is utter nonsense: Rebreathers are big, heavy, cumbersome, complicated and very susceptible to failure. Add to this that the gadget
also fails if you go through a pocket of oxygen-poor water (such as the water you’ve just been through) and you have a reliability nightmare on your hands.
It’s hard to work out what advantage this device offers: Divers are still subject to the same constraints: Nitrogen build-up (i.e. decompression sickness),
nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity – the only difference is you have a fuel cell instead of an oxygen tank and more gadgetry.
Please put a few line breaks in your next article. It is so hard to read a gigantic brick of text.
Dig through your old National Geographic magazines, cave diving scientists in Mexico use such technology for about last 15 years! It’s funny how something gets invented in this world of ours, it the MARKETER that gets the fame for inventing it.
15l of air per minute is a tiny amount for an open circuit and so it would have to be used closed
This would be very good if you could use some sort of gyro to recharge the battery as you where swimming.
I have a better idea, stuck your face a fish’s ass and let him do the breathing for you and go for the dive
It is based upon simple physics.
1 The water contains disolved oxyge,
2 This oxygen can be accesses by flowing it into a container where the pressure is loswer.
3 The oxygen depleted water flows out and is freplaces by fresh water.
4 The major problem is what to do with the exhaled crbon dioxide. It is usually combined with calts carried in the device. Alternately it can be put back under pressure into the water flowing out. This takes more energy. The same rotating device that reduces presuure for the incomming water can be connected to the waste gas pressuring stage.
5 The linit is the available power.
Actually, the 15 liter per minute flow is actually 30 liters per minute – not much, but it may be enough with the reserve tank shown in the flash presentation (do look at it, it will clear much of the confusion in the previous comments). With each breath, you exchange no more than 3 liters of air, and that would mean 10 breaths at lest, without the reserve… In my oppinion, this system is most likely to make it to market as a semi-closed system with a computer controlling all aspects of gas mixture, with scrubber included. (unfortunately, as this makes it all the more error-prone, expensive and complicated). It must also be noted, that the system looks like it could be scaled, and hence its output relies mainly on the amount of power available.
Given the massive research in the area of batteries, the 30 liter per minute output may easily be improved to support a simple open system cost effectively. Here is an interesting maths problem for you:
if you have a 12 liter compressed air tank at the normal 200 bar pressure, that will give you a total of 2400 liters of air on the surface. At 10m bellow water, that makes a theoretical (no reserve!) maximum of 1200 liters. If you consume that at 30 liters a minute (theoretical output of this apparatus), then you get 40 minutes of bottom time. I’ve been down there longer with a tank, so I think 30 liters a minute will be quite enough.
Sorry for being long
I’m anxious to see a prototype. And yes, several questions come to mind…. How deep of a depth will it allow a diver to go?
What about the nitrogen saturation?
Will a diver have to surface in a timed fashion as with normal gear?
How large of a unit will it be?
What kind of a failsafe to protect the diver from a battery malfunction?
It is a great idea…..hopefully it will not just be a military application.
Finally we can enjoy underwater lovemaking, damn i hated those tanks
Way cool! And invented by someone from Israel, too. WHY is it that the Jews perform so many technological miracles and the Muslims…well, you know?
Interesting. It will have to account for Henry’s Law in that it will need to work harder at greater depths to produce the same amount of oxygen. A simple depth gauge wouldn’t work b/c of the high cost of being wrong, so there must be an interesting negative feedback loop setup measuring the actual production of oxygen.
Good article!
There are however a few unanswered questions and problems with this system…..
Firstly, to breath at depth we need pressurized air to expand our lungs, our diaphragms and intercostal muscles are insufficient to inflate our lungs at depths much greater than 2 metres. In that case, Henry’s Law or not, you would lose out by the fact that any extra O2 stored in pressurized water would need to be used in pressurising the breathable gasses.
Secondly, breathing pure O2 at depth is fraught with it’s own dangers of narcosis effects, as discovered by WWII frogmen….hence SCUBA uses Air, Nitrox, Heli-Ox etc and never pure O2. I may be wrong but I’m not aware that Nitrogen dissolves all that well in water.
Thirdly, it would be a folly to make any comparison between how this machine works and a fish’s ability to extract O2 from water as they have blood that is
very very good at drawing the oxygen out of the water at very little loss.
In all I would suspect that this device might be able to draw oxygen from the water, but whether or not we could breath it is a different matter.
well you know’, what?
Bruce you had to bring religion, politics and your ugly side out, get a life man, go dive, meet people, jews, christians, muslims, athiests for all I care maybe you’ll learn a thing or two and we’d have one less ignorant’s filth staining our world…
Thanks to everyone that is sharing their invaluable analysis and knowledge.
Israeli vaporware. The only thing that desolves is the investors money.
Professor, you’re not too sharp at detecting the sarcasm, you numbbrain.
It cannot be closed circuit – by definition is has an intake and is therefore open circuit. “Studies have shown that in a depth of 200m below the sea there is still about 1.5% of dissolved air” Where did this information come from? What does 1.5% mean – 1.5% of the amount at the compared to that at the surface?
This means processing a large volume of water: If you use 1 unit mass of air at the surface then that amount of air will be contained with approx 66 times that volume at depth.
1.5% of mass is air at that depth? This makes life a bit easier. A few grams of air can come from a couple of hundred grams of water.
So, any volunteers for the first dive to 200m?