How many saturation divers are there

In a hyperbaric chamber, your voice also changes because of increased air density, and the combination of helium and increased density make for voices that are really hard to understand. Thus, saturation diving operations use voice descramblers so divers can be understood. Helium is a tiny molecule with poor thermal properties, which means it is easy to breathe but strips heat from the diver with every exhalation.

Because of this, the temperature of the living quarters must be kept high to prevent hypothermia. When the divers are in the water working, they wear hot-water suits, which are similar to wetsuits but have tubes with hot water continuously running through them to keep the divers warm. Other considerations that must be taken into account in the sat chamber include infection prevention and diver health.

Saturation divers are as isolated as astronauts living on the space station, so they must be medically trained to deal with any emergency that may occur. They are typically trained as diver medical technicians DMTs. During this course, the commercial diver learns how to insert IV catheters, suture wounds and even deal with life-threatening conditions such as tension pneumothoraces that require pleurocentesis — the release of trapped air from the pleural lining of the lungs.

A typical working day involves 16 hours of rest and sleep in the living quarters and eight hours of diving, in what are known as bell runs.

A diving bell is locked onto the chamber, and the pressure is matched. The diver then transfers under pressure TUP from the chamber to the bell. The bell is locked out and then lowered by umbilical to the seafloor, where the moon pool, a hatch at the bottom of the bell, can be opened for the divers to exit. Their breathing gas is supplied via hoses from the surface. The gear involved is much the same as the gear used for commercial diving inshore, except that it captures the expired gas for reclamation and recompression of the helium.

They even monitor the function of such things as the toilet, which dumps outside of the chamber. When the divers leave the living quarters to enter the bell for work, another team, called dive control, takes over and runs the dive from the surface. They prepare the bell, launch it and monitor the divers as they work. This allows the bell to be lowered directly adjacent to the pipeline, for example, and remain in the same position. In addition to its use in deep-sea work, saturation diving is also used in tunneling and caisson work.

Saturation diving is based on the principle that the pressure of the dissolved gas in the blood and tissues is the same as that of the gas in the lungs. Basically, a diver goes down to a depth, perhaps feet, and remains there until no more gas can dissolve in the tissues -- the tissues are saturated with nitrogen.

Once the saturation point has been reached, the time required for decompression will be the same no matter how much longer the diver stays at that depth, whether it be a minute, an hour, a day or a week. This principle has been used for divers who live and work in undersea habitats. It was used by the divers in the submersible oil rig in the film "The Abyss. One idea that is being researched to prevent the need for saturation diving and decompression at great depths is liquid breathing , which was also shown in "The Abyss.

Because no gas phase is in contact with the blood, and nitrogen is not used, the danger of forming nitrogen bubbles does not exist. In the s, it was shown that rats could survive for up to 20 hours when immersed in such a mixture.

Potentially, liquid breathing could allow a diver to reach depths of up to feet m. You definitely need a good understanding of maths and physics. And you need to be fit. Don't get me wrong, I smoke and drink, but there is certainly no room for drug use because you will be tested at work. I train four times a day, with lots of cardio and weights. It's a physically exhausting role. What we do is heavy construction and a lot of the work is putting pipes together.

You might have a 20 kilometre pipe and the divers will physically bolt the last metres together. The bolts can be 90 kilos each, so it's heavy gear. The fitter you are, the better chance you have of surviving an accident. Bravery also helps. It's quite something to get out of a diving bell underwater in the pitch black. It's not for everyone. Deep sea diving is as close as you can get to outer space on Earth. You're walking on parts of the world that man has never set foot on and seeing things few people have before.

It's just a rush. It's as close to being an astronaut as you can get. You're also working with a great bunch of lads and there is good camaraderie within the team. You're working with people at the absolute top of their game. It would be very easy to get big headed about it all, but because you all do the same thing, everyone keeps level-headed. There's no room for tension when you're working in such close quarters. The best piece of advice I got was to always remember that there are 11 other personalities down there with you.

You've got to get on with each other and avoid any tension. You need to be pretty tolerant. You've got to have quite a rounded personality and it's not about being big, loud and tough. It's about being professional.

It pays a lot of money and there is such competition for the work that you don't want to create any waves.