Water pressure and you

[AVGWarhawk]

This is very interesting:


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/sc...ce&oref=slogin

[Sailor Steve]

A new wrinkle for the 'Shrunken Heads' business.

[SUBMAN1]

Salty eggs are good!

...But the experimentally minded on such expeditions were also tempted to see what might withstand the pressure, and in at least one instance sent down a raw egg.


Filled with incompressible fluid, Ms. Kaharl wrote, the egg returned to the surface “perfectly intact and edible, but salty.”

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

Salty eggs are good!

The egg makes perfect sense as to why it did not crush. The salty taste? As the article reads, the water attempts to penetrate every thing so the egg is not resistent to the salt looking to get it's way in. So, if we fill a sub with egg whites/yoke can she go to depths 2 miles down or more? :hmm:

[August]

One thing that never ceased to amaze me during my SCUBA diving days is how you can begin exhaling as you ascend from 100ft and still be exhaling as you broke the surface a couple minutes later.

[StdDev]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

So, if we fill a sub with egg whites/yoke can she go to depths 2 miles down or more? :hmm:

I'm pretty sure that under those conditions the sub could go all the way to the bottom!!!!

[Tango589]

So, if we fill a sub with egg whites/yoke can she go to depths 2 miles down or more? :hmm:

You can, but one on-board explosion and you would have one hell of a omellette!

Ps. I have now turned into one of the Village People!

[AVGWarhawk]

So, think about. If we fill a sub with egg yoke or any liquid that does not compress like brake fluid. Put a man inside suspended in the fluid with air tanks to breath, in theory, could it go all the way to the bottom without recourse to the man inside?

[August]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

So, think about. If we fill a sub with egg yoke or any liquid that does not compress like brake fluid. Put a man inside suspended in the fluid with air tanks to breath, in theory, could it go all the way to the bottom without recourse to the man inside?

No. Even assuming the tank has enough air pressure in it to overcome the pressure of the water at some point the air will become so compressed that it will become toxic to breath even a single breath.

[seafarer]

I have a bunch of those cups, as does every member of my family and some friends (my mother has hers in a curio table with some deep-sea clam and mussel shells). It was pretty customary to decorate a bunch to go down on each of your own dives. On one ALVIN dive series off the Oregon coast, they even did a whole human torso. But that came out pretty weird - as do some of the heads (wig display holders actually). Many of those larger styrofoam pieces are cast in two halves and then joined to make the whole head/torso/body. Sometimes, the halves come from different batches of foam, and they compress differently, giving a kind of mutated result.

That article should have shown some of the shrunken heads - the cups are quite bland in comparison :p

[Trex]

Originally Posted by August

No. Even assuming the tank has enough air pressure in it to overcome the pressure of the water at some point the air will become so compressed that it will become toxic to breath even a single breath.

I suspect there would also be a problem with those parts of the body containing air. While the incompressible liquid of the body might not collapse, one cannot guarantee that for places like lungs, gut, ears, sinuses, etc.

Your idea has however found a following in some scifi books for high-G support.

[AVGWarhawk]

I guess perhaps it would not work as the egg liquid is not compressable but does experience compression to a certain point. A person inside the compression zone would be feeling the weight, yes?

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by Trex

I suspect there would also be a problem with those parts of the body containing air. While the incompressible liquid of the body might not collapse, one cannot guarantee that for places like lungs, gut, ears, sinuses, etc.

Your idea has however found a following in some scifi books for high-G support.

This is true, so the solution was devloped to use liquid breathing, but I assume not perfected yet, but you never know what the Navy is up to anyway. The idea is that before you were born, you were breathing in your mothers womb, but breathing embryonic fluid, so your lungs can handle the liquid. So the idea came about to use the liquid / oxygen solution that you could breath, and operate without need for containment pressures to 1000's of feet down. No air in the lung, and your body does not need to compensate for the changes in pressure - similar to a fish.

My guess is, it would become quite painful to put this suit on and start breathing the liquid - you'd probably think you were drowning, just that you would never really drown. I wonder if in your panic you could damage your lungs? Just a thought.

-S

[SUBMAN1]

Wikipedia, though a terrible source for inaccurate information sometimes (Or should I say, mis-information), has some info on it I found:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing

-S

Liquid breathing


Liquid breathing is a form of respiration in which a normally air-breathing organism breathes an oxygen-rich liquid (usually a perfluorocarbon), rather than breathing air. It is used for medical treatment and could some day find use in deep diving and space travel. Liquid breathing is sometimes called fluid breathing, but this can be confusing because both liquids and gases can be called fluids.


Diving

In diving, the pressure inside the lungs must effectively equal the pressure outside the body, otherwise the lungs collapse. Mathematically speaking, if the diver is f feet (or m meters) deep, and the air pressure at the water surface is p bar (usually p = 1, but less at high-altitude lakes such as Lake Titicaca), he must breathe fluid at a pressure of f/33+p = m/10+p bar.

Since external and internal pressures must be equal, the required gas pressure increases with depth to match the increased external water pressure, rising to around 13 bar at 400 feet (120m), and around 500 bar on the oceans' abyssal plains. These high pressures may have adverse effects on the body, especially when quickly released (as in a too-rapid return to the surface), including air emboli and decompression sickness (colloquially known as "the bends"). (Diving mammals, as well as free-diving humans who dive to great depths on a single breath, have little or no problem with decompression sickness despite their rapid return to the surface, since a single breath of gas does not contain enough total nitrogen to cause tissue bubbles on decompression. In very deep-diving mammals and deep free-diving humans, the lungs almost completely collapse).

One solution is a rigid articulated diving suit, but these are bulky and clumsy. A more moderate option to deal with narcosis is to breathe heliox or trimix, in which some or all of the nitrogen is replaced by helium. However, this option does not deal with the problem of bubbles and decompression sickness, because helium dissolves in tissues and causes bubbles when pressures are released, just like nitrogen does.

Liquid breathing provides a third option. With liquid in the lungs, the pressure within the diver's lungs could accommodate changes in the pressure of the surrounding water without the huge gas partial pressure exposures required when the lungs are filled with gas. Liquid breathing would not result in the saturation of body tissues with high pressure nitrogen or helium that occurs with the use of non-liquids, thus would reduce or remove the need for slow decompression. (This technology was dramatized in James Cameron's 1989 film The Abyss.)

A significant problem, however, arises from the high viscosity of the liquid and the corresponding reduction in its ability to remove CO2. All uses of liquid breathing for diving must involve total liquid ventilation (see above). Total liquid ventilation, however, has difficulty moving enough liquid to carry away CO2, because no matter how great the total pressure is, the amount of partial CO2 gas pressure available to dissolve CO2 into the breathing liquid can never be much more than the pressure at which CO2 exists in the blood (about 40 mm of mercury (Torr)).

At these pressures, most fluorocarbon liquids require about 70 mL/kg minute-ventilation volumes of liquid (about 5 L/min for a 70 kg adult) to remove enough CO2 for normal resting metabolism.[10] This is a great deal of fluid to move, particularly as liquids are generally more viscous than gases, (for example water is about 56 times the viscosity of air). Any increase in the diver's metabolic activity also increases CO2 production and the breathing rate, which is already at the limits of realistic flow rates in liquid breathing.[11][12] It seems unlikely that a person would move 10 liters/min of fluorocarbon liquid without assistance from a mechanical ventilator, so "free breathing" may be unlikely.

Now this is interesting:

The movie The Abyss also features a scene with a rat submerged in and breathing fluorocarbon liquid, filmed in real life.

[August]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

I guess perhaps it would not work as the egg liquid is not compressable but does experience compression to a certain point. A person inside the compression zone would be feeling the weight, yes?

Nope, not as long as any air in their body was compressed to a pressure comparable to the water pressure around them.