Talk:Decompression stop

nice article

........

Things to do

• describe the mechanisms involved in decompression stops:
  • offgassing
  • bubble reduction
• types of deep stops:
  • Pyle
  • reducing gradients
  • WKPP deep stops

2000 foot dive

Dear Mark,

Thank's for all the info. I'm not a diver but I'm trying to learn about diving, decompression, etc. In the movie The Abyss, the divers work safely at 2000 feet and I have some questions:

1. In this hypothetical 2000 feet dive, using scuba, how much time would be necessary to descent?

2. How much time would be necessary to decompress?

3. Is it possible to design a decompression table for this situaton?

Thank's

Alvaro Augusto http://alvaug.multiply.com

Although the question was not directed at me, I will take liberty of replying.

1. The rate of descent in SCUBA diving is usually only limited by diver's ability to equalize his sinuses. There are some opinions that too rapid descent increases affects of Nitrogen narcosis, but it is not confirmed.

2. SCUBA dive to 2000 meters was not attempted yet. The record for deepest SCUBA dive is about 330 meters (990 feet). The wet decompression (actual acsent in the water) was 26 hours, and after that dry decompression was performed (in a decompression chamber).

3. Dives below 100 meters (300 feet) require using different gases on different stages of the dive, such as trimix and nitrox. It would be impractical to design decompression table for each dive profile. Therefore special decompression software (such as V-Planner and GAP Software) is used to calculate decompression stops.

I hope this was helpful. You are welcome to ask me further questions. Michagal 08:19, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't know the answers to your questions - a 2000 ft dive is way out of my depth. Here's a link to some links to deco software, http://www.deepdiving.net/tools/deco.html. I've used ZPlan, DDPlan and MV-Plan. I think you'll find none will plan a dive as deep as you want. Mark.murphy 20:56, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

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Coming in late to this party:

Open Circuit SCUBA to 2000 feet, is not gonna happen.

The ambient pressure at a depth of 2000 feet (600 meters), is about 600 atmospheres (ATA).

• That's twice the pressure of a "high pressure" (300 bar) SCUBA tank. So even a "high pressure" tank, will not have anywhere near enough pressure, to deliver even a single breathe of air, at that depth.

• Even if you got special high pressure tanks that COULD deliver air at that depth, the density of that air will be ~600 times normal - precluding the use any normal SCUBA breathing regulators (in my opinion).

• Assuming a descent rate of 30 meters/minute, it would take about 20 minutes to get down to that depth. From an air consumption viewpoint, that's 20 minutes at an average depth of 1000 feet (300 meters). Let's assume a personal air consumption rate of 0.5 cubic feet per minute at sea level. To get down, you'll need 20 * 0.5 * 300 cubic feet of air (surface equivalent), ie. 3000 cubic feet. That's THIRTY standard 100 cu.ft. SCUBA tanks - and a similar number to get back up afterwards!

So you could maybe go straight down to 2000 feet, turn around IMMEDIATELY, and come straight back up, if you had SIXTY specially manufactured tanks and breathing regulators - EXCEPT:

• Gas mixtures that are safe to breathe when shallower, are not safe to breathe when very deep - and vice versa. So you'll need multiple tanks of different gas mixtures, each of which you can only use at certain depths. You'd need at least double the number of tanks required by the previous naive calculations - ie. 120 tanks.

• The decompression requirements would be enormous. Let's say 80 hours at 6 meters depth. (This is a guess, but there's no way it would be less.) This would need 80 * 60 * 0.5 * 1.6 = 3840 cubic feet (surface equivalent) of decompression gas - another ~40 standard 100 cu.ft. tanks! We now have 160 tanks for the dive.

• No sane technical diver goes deep diving without backup breathing gas. This is in case the main tank(s) or breathing regulator(s) malfunction. Let's use an arbitrary safety factor of 20%. This gives 32 more tanks, for backup!

So, since SCUBA means self contained underwater breathing apparatus (not surface supplied), I'd say that you're good to go - as soon as you get the special tanks and breathing regulators designed, manufactured, and tested - and work out how you'll handle the *NEARLY TWO HUNDRED TANKS* that you'll need on the dive !!

Closed Circuit SCUBA is different. The gas supply is recirculated, instead of being lost to the system on each exhalation. But the equipment issues, and decompression requirements, would still be so large, as to make a dive to 2000 feet completely impractical in my opinion.

Saturation diving is different again. The divers live in a habitat at the actual maximum depth. Their decompression obligations soon plateau, so it doesn't matter how much longer they stay down (from a decompression viewpoint). When they've finished, they get hauled back up to the surface, and stay in a recompression chamber for days or weeks until they've decompressed safely. But that isn't "SCUBA" in any accepted sense of that word.

TC 203.122.223.121 (talk) 07:12, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Not really, TC. One atmosphere of pressure is 10 metres of water. So at around 2,000 ft or 600 metres, the ambient pressure is about 60 bar - quite easy to deliver from standard tanks. Nobody would be breathing air at that depth, a helium-hydrogen mix with less than 2.5% oxygen is required (hydreliox). Fortunately, that mix is between 1/7 and 1/14 the density of air, so even at 60x its surface density (not 600x), it would be breathable without a massive extra effort. Obviously, a rebreather would be the sensible choice for this sort of very extreme diving, as dive duration is approximately independent of depth for a CCR. The sane backup for a rebreather is a second rebreather, of course, rather than 200 tanks. Since a CCR will dynamically alter the mix on descent/ascent, there's no need for different tanks containing different mixes. Realistically, the obvious way of conducting such dives is via excursion from a bell with controlled staged descent to ameliorate HPNS (a descent rate of 30 m/s is impractically fast for that reason). The eventual decompression could be of the order of weeks, but still perfectly manageable with that sort of system. Finally, there's a 1994 paper describing some experiments at 50 ATA undertaken by Comex that might be of interest:

• Abraini, JH (1994). "Psychophysiological reactions in humans during an open sea dive to 500 m with a hydrogen-helium-oxygen mixture". Journal of Applied Physiology. 76 (3). American Physiological Society: 1113–8. OCLC 8750-7587/94. PMID 8005852. Retrieved 2009-03-01. {{cite journal}}: Check |oclc= value (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

Hope that helps. --RexxS (talk) 08:41, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Doggone it dude! You're right, 2000 feet depth is 60 bar, not 600. But my main point was, there's no way you could do that dive on open circuit (including descent, ascent and decompression). I still contend this - and I think you would agree - due to decompression gas requirements, if for no other reason. Yes? No? TC 203.122.223.121 (talk) 09:57, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

I agree, of course. Because of HPNS, the descent rate is limited to a few metres/minute (requiring days rather than hours to reach 600 m), and decompression obligations are of the order of a week (Bennet & Elliott, page 325). A diver using open circuit scuba would likely be using around 1,000 litres of gas per minute at 600 m, and 500 L/min at 300 m - an impossibly large amount of gas to try to supply using open circuit. A rebreather oxygen cylinder (3 L @ 300 bar) contains around 800 litres of oxygen, and a relaxed diver with low metabolism might hope to use about 0.5 litre of oxygen per minute – giving a dive duration of 1600 min, or about 27 hours per rebreather. Having multiple rebreathers to switch to at fixed points on a shot line might make such a dive possible on self-contained closed circuit, but as you can see there's really no margin for error. Realistically, any scuba diving that needed to be done at that sort of depth would have to be as excursions from a surface-supplied bell. I think that Comex's Hydra 8 experiment in 1988 still holds the open-water record for scuba at 535 metres (that was an excursion from a bell) – not too far off the 600 metres that the original poster referred to. Comex also did a simulated dive to 701 metres (Hydra 10 experiments) in 1992, so it's technologically and physiologically possible, but not yet accomplished. --RexxS (talk) 22:53, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your informative responses :-) TC 203.122.223.121 (talk) 04:47, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Dive profile

The dive profile are usualy drawn with Y-axis (depth) pointing down. I would suggest replacing the image. Michagal 10:17, 13 August 2006 (UTC)