http://www.isracast.com/tech_news/310505_tech.htm

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Woo-hoo! =D>

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My problem with this concept is that fish are cold blooded and require much less oxygen to maintain their metabolisim than mamals.

Typical lung capacity is ~1.2l and at-rest breathing rate is ~15 breaths/min rising to 60 - 75 for hard physical activity so for maintained diving we would need an air supply of up to 1.2*60l/min = 70l/min. If there is only 1.5% disolved air at 200m then it would require up to 4800l/min (4.8 tonne/min!) of completely de-airated water to provide that volume of air. That's a lot of water to process and expell, a lot more if the process is less than 100% efficient.

Cavitation on the equipment would also be a problem and I think the noise generated would be horrific.

There may be other factors to consider too (I don't know a lot about disolved gasses at depth but water will disolve a lot more CO2 than O2 this may further complicate the problem. Also working submerged for long periods has its own dangers from saturation and the lenght of time required for decompression.

The guy seems to be touting for funding despite the 'interest' of government and diving agencies - I don't think I would invest in his idea.

Edit: typo

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It seems the process needs a lot of electicity, which will also weight some kilos. And still you need an emergency tank which can't be too small if you are saturation diving and cannot simply go to the surface in 5 minutes when the motor fails.
My feeling is, the new design isn't KISS.
Also, how about pressurizing the gas? The centifuge lowers the pressure, so the gas gets out of the water. But then it must be pressurized again to the pressure of the water around, so it can get into your lungs.

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RON HOWARD

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Sounds fishy to me.

Oooooh, that one stank.

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Live Science is reporting this, too.

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I like crinoids.

Since there would only be oxygen in the system and whatever nitorgen or inert gas is contained in the loop, I doubt decompressoin would be much of a problem. It can't be a pure oxygen system since oxygen is toxic to humans when the partial pressure hits 200%. A pure oxygen system becomes toxic at 2 atmospheres, or about 30 feet down. This is one problem with traditional re-breathers which use pure oxygen (the other big problem is that the scrubbing agents give off chlorine gas if exposed to water).

It would be a simple matter to allow gasses to exchange across a semi-permiable membrane, but how many square meters would it take to support a diver?

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And subs get can get their oxygen from water anyway

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I see some fluisol/Liquivent/surfactants being used by deep divers in high pressure environments.