Science of Diving PDF

PREFACE

The physics, biology, engineering, physiology, medicine, and chemistry of diving center on pressure, and pressure changes. The average individual is subjected to atmospheric pressure swings of 3% at sea level, as much as 20% a mile in elevation, more at higher altitudes, and all usually over time spans of hours to days. Divers and their equipment can experience compressions and decompressions orders of magnitude greater, and within considerably shorter time scales. While the effects of pressure change are readily quantified in physics, chemistry, and engineering applications, the physiology, medicine, and biology of pressure changes in living systems are much more complicated. Caution is needed in transposing biological principles from one pressure range to another. Incomplete knowledge and biochemical complexities often prevent extensions of even simple causal relationships in biological science. Causal relationships between observables are the pervue of physics and that diffi cult process in living systems is biophysics.

This complex science translated to technical diving is discussed in a Five Part series, with each topic self contained and strategically developed in relationship to diving. Topics span many disciplines and focus on a number of technical arenas. Targeted audience is the commercial diver, instructor, hyperbaric technician, underwater researcher, and technical diver looking for greater detail, and especially the doctor, physiologist, physicist, chemist, mathematician, engineer, or biologist by training. Topics include energy and matter interactions, thermodynamics, pressure and density, mechanics, gas kinetics, free and dissolved phase transfer, nucleation and cavitation, bubbles and surfactants, oxygen dose, gas mixtures, buoyancy, gauges and tanks, compressors and regulators, maladies and drugs, statistics, profile and diving model comparisons, risk and probability, data banks and fitting, distributions, waves, transport, currents, geology, oceanography, geophysics, global warming and cooling, solar energy and radiation. References are included. Appendix A reviews basic physical laws and associated concepts and Appendix B details and discusses diveware and dive planning software. A suite of application exercises is provided for example at strategic points in the text. This monograph extends, updates, and rewrites an earlier work published in 2001. Additional material focusing on diving data, statistical correlations, underwater tests, and risk is presented and additional applications (numerical exercises) are included. For the experienced diver, this is a workbook. For the neophyte diver, it is likely primer and workbook