Why this is an Army, and not Navy, project escapes me. But no matter, here’s an interesting tidbit I found over at Military.com:
The Army recently handed Case Western Reserve University and Waltham, MA’s Infoscitex Corp. a joint contract to start investigating a “Microfabricated Biomimetic Artificial Gill System… based on the subdividing regions of clef, filament, and lamellae found in natural fish gills.” In the first phase of the program, “gas exchange units will be designed and demonstrated for rapid, efficient extract of oxygen from surrounding water.”
Further, it seems the Israelis already have something
All this work will be for naught unless we also develop a way to talk to fish. Tremble, terrorists! An army of Aquamen is on its way!
Comment by Just John — 20051130 @ 1723
Interestingly, that was one of Carl Sagan’s points last night (communicating with whales, actually).
Comment by Kevin Connors — 20051130 @ 1836
The Army has their own diving capability, independent of the Navy, as noted here and here. But I’m told that the training, equipment, and doctrine are generally similar.
I’m not a diver myself, but it appears that, besides the obvious benefits to the diver, a tankless system would reduce the logistical support requirements for deployed diving detachments.
I suspect that the Navy is letting the Army foot the bill for this one, not to mention having to work out any bugs in the system.
Comment by The_Real_JeffS — 20051130 @ 2224
The Navy uses several different types of diving equipment, depending on the mission. There are surface supplied systems, like those you saw in the movie Men of Honor (only much more modern than the old Mk 5) There are SCUBA systems much like commercial and sport divers use, and for tactical use where bubbles are undesireable there are rebreathers, which scrub CO2 and introduce O2 as needed, recycling the breathing gas.
SEALs and underwater EOD (mine clearance) use the latter. In the case of EOD, it’s because open circuit systems like SCUBA produce noise which you don’t want around acoustic mines (also, current rebreathers are nonmagnetic because guess what you don’t want to have around magnetic mines).
A gill based system probably would not replace the rebreathers unless it somehow avoided releasing exhaled gas into the water (and it’d have to go somewhere - you couldn’t store it on the diver because it would affect buoyancy). Also, you’d probably want a small bottle of nitrogen or other inert gas to mix with the oxygen because O2 is toxic at high concentrations. Breathing oxygen at a partial pressure of 2.0 (which you get with regular air at less than three hundred feet depth) will produce convulsions and unconsciousness - your mileage may vary. Regardless, having these things happen underwater will fatally kill you to death.
None of these musings in any way takes away my astonishment at thie line of research. If successful, it would be the greatest breakthrough in diving since Cousteau’s aqualung.
Comment by Steve Skubinna — 20051201 @ 0036
Skubinna– Wouldn’t you assume that the gill system was just supplying oxygen to a rebreather system?
Comment by James Agenbroad — 20051201 @ 0822
James, it could work that way. Whether it’d be worth it would depend on how heavy, massive, complex, and expensive the gills turn out to be (or turn out not to be - well, you know what I mean). Of course, like anything else they’ll get smaller and probably cheaper with development.
It seems to me that the best application for this would be in small, relatively self contained systems intended for very long submersion. I think an underwater dwelling or workshop would be cool - you could stick a team of SpecOps guys somewhere offshore and have them wait for… whatever. Or else have a team reach the shoreline and disappear - no submarine to track or boat to chase, and when you figure they’re long gone, they come back.
But new technology has a way of ending up in forms, and having effects radically different from what was initially envisioned.
Comment by Steve Skubinna — 20051203 @ 2259