Talk:Diving suit
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[edit] wetsuits aren't just for diving
as the fact that wetsuit redirecting here combined with the section in this article seem to imply. they are also used in many other watersports especially those where thier is quite a high probablility of getting wet. some people even deliberately swim in them although i belive they add a lot of effort to doing so.
how best to handle this? should other uses be handled here? should wetsuit be split out? what? Plugwash
ok i partially take that back thier are references to other uses but they are in passing right at the end of the section Plugwash 23:16, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
- There is a seperate article on Wetsuits that discusses non-diving uses. This article is on diving suits, and so discussion of other uses for wetsuits are not appropriate. - David Scarlett 10:32, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
Ok i didn't notice that article at "wetsuit" (without the space) and "wet suit" redirected here at the time i made that post (bloody anons). Plugwash 11:37, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] How a Wetsuit Works
I think people should get the real story of how a wetsuit works. Its not cause it lets in water!! Wear a plastic bag over it and they are just as warm. It is because nitrogen is an insulating gas. Neoprene is a synethetic rubber made by Dupont and it has essentially no thermal resistance (no warmth.) Look it up! or I'll save you some time [1] Think about it. Why is a dry suit warmer than a wetsuit? Because no water gets in. So why would you want water in a wetsuit? To keep you warm? I don't think so water is a excellent thermal conductor.
- IIRC the basic idea behind a wetsuit is that the water goes in initially (why you initially feel cold when you enter water in a wetsuit) and only changes quite slowly after that, so it has time to heat up to body temperature. Also having some water in there dilutes the sweat and makes them a bit less sticky. Plugwash 11:24, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
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- Unfortuantely links to magazines tend to expire quite quickly, so here's a useful link that may stay longer [2] - if you look at the the quoted figures you'll see that water conducts slightly better than neoprene, and 20 times more than air (refer to [3] to see that O2 & N2 have the same conductivity). However, it is quite inappropriate to call water an excellent conductor, when there are materials (metals) that conduct up to 1,000 times better than water. The real reason that a wetsuit works is that water has a high capacity to hold heat and is consequently an excellent convector. Without a wetsuit heat would be removed from the skin and carried away by moving water. With a wetsuit a thin layer of water gets in, but cannot convect away. This layer of water insulates about as well as the neoprene as long as it is not continually escaping and being replaced ("flushing"). It should be obvious that trapping a layer of air near to the skin will provide 20 times the insulation of water or neoprene - that's how a dry suit works. RexxS (talk) 01:50, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
- The problem is that dry suits work in two ways. Some merely keep water out so that a standard air-trapping material inside, like nylon fleece, can do the heat insulation (you could even use goosedown if the dang things didn't tend to leak a bit at the neckseal). Other drysuits have a layer of neoprene foam on the outside so that they are capable of insulation even if you have little on, underneath. Or that adds to what you have on. Most people don't understand that a plain uninsulated drysuit (slick outside, no neoprene foam inside) with no air insulation inside or outside, would not work well. It would cling to the skin with the squeeze and would be as COLD as wrapping yourself in a form fitting garbage bag. There IS not thin later of air next to the skin in the average drysuit with no undergarment at depth, and even if there was one, there would be serious free convection problems with it.
Good insulators need two things: a poor conductor (like a gas), AND small semi-sealed cells to break up natural convection. That's how feathers and fiberweaves work, and under a drysuit, and outside a drysuit, they do the same. Both wetsuits and drysuits are often insulated with neoprene foam which contains aircells, and that provides the insulation. That thin layer of water inside your wetsuit isn't worth much-- not only does it have worse insulation overall than an equal thickness of skin and fat below it (which isn't much), but it is subject to natural and forced convection also, since nothing breaks currents in it up (unlike the case with your subcutaneous fat, which isn't well vascularized, so has no natural, and little forced convection). Without the neoprene air cells, a "wetsuit" would do you no more good than wearing ordinary fiber clothing (say, polyester jeans and a sweater) in water. Which also leaves a layer of water next to the skin, but which isn't worth much, per se. SBHarris 02:10, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
- Although I'm certain I agree with almost all you say, I'm not sure I agree with your view that drysuits work in two ways. Uncompressed neoprene has maybe half the conductivity of water or 10 times that of still air. Even 8mm neoprenes only have the same insulation as 0.8mm of air so they don't make much of a contribution compared with a few mm of air trapped within an undersuit. This is particularly so when you consider that below about 15 metres depth, the neoprene is severely compressed and loses a lot of its insulation value. I think folks make too much of the thermal insulation that a drysuit might provide - in truth it's the undersuit that determines the insulation. Anecdotally, I've had two regular buddies who dived in Viking neoprene suits - they invariably wore undersuits several mm thick. Any water warm enough to dive without an undersuit, they would dive in a semidry. I've never been a fan of uncompressed neoprene (mainly because of the 8-10Kg buoyancy change with depth); I started diving with an Aquion trilaminate (membrane) suit which I used for several years, then replaced it with a DUI crushed neoprene. In the same water conditions, I've found that with either drysuit, I've needed the same undersuit - that's the bit that keeps me warm!
- I suppose to get back on-topic (improving the articles), we ought to be considering how much detail & explanation ought to be in Dry suit and Wet suit. Is the detail of comparative conductivities and the importance of stopping convection useful to the aim of improving those articles (and this one), or would we be accused of "Too Much Information"? RexxS (talk) 07:29, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
- The problem is that dry suits work in two ways. Some merely keep water out so that a standard air-trapping material inside, like nylon fleece, can do the heat insulation (you could even use goosedown if the dang things didn't tend to leak a bit at the neckseal). Other drysuits have a layer of neoprene foam on the outside so that they are capable of insulation even if you have little on, underneath. Or that adds to what you have on. Most people don't understand that a plain uninsulated drysuit (slick outside, no neoprene foam inside) with no air insulation inside or outside, would not work well. It would cling to the skin with the squeeze and would be as COLD as wrapping yourself in a form fitting garbage bag. There IS not thin later of air next to the skin in the average drysuit with no undergarment at depth, and even if there was one, there would be serious free convection problems with it.
- Unfortuantely links to magazines tend to expire quite quickly, so here's a useful link that may stay longer [2] - if you look at the the quoted figures you'll see that water conducts slightly better than neoprene, and 20 times more than air (refer to [3] to see that O2 & N2 have the same conductivity). However, it is quite inappropriate to call water an excellent conductor, when there are materials (metals) that conduct up to 1,000 times better than water. The real reason that a wetsuit works is that water has a high capacity to hold heat and is consequently an excellent convector. Without a wetsuit heat would be removed from the skin and carried away by moving water. With a wetsuit a thin layer of water gets in, but cannot convect away. This layer of water insulates about as well as the neoprene as long as it is not continually escaping and being replaced ("flushing"). It should be obvious that trapping a layer of air near to the skin will provide 20 times the insulation of water or neoprene - that's how a dry suit works. RexxS (talk) 01:50, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Jeans
The "Dive skins and jeans" section needs clean-up so that, among other things, the buoyancies on the jeans agree and Wikipedia isn't accused of being sponsored by Levi Strauss. - 128.237.241.229 19:48, 8 February 2005 (UTC)
The jeans and skins section needs a cleanup desperately. It changes the story throughout where it says 2 digfferent things about jeans. - 88.104.159.242 21:02, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
Is this serious? At first I though this section was an April Fool's joke, but it looks like it's been there since May 2004. Has anyone here actually ever heard of anyone seriously using jeans as exposure protection while diving? The current description is almost a word-for-word copy of this article, but I couldn't say which came first. It also sounds like an ad for Levis. I think this section should be reverted back to the skins section that existed prior to the addition of the jeans bit, or at the very least reverted back to before the December 2004 expansion of the jeans section that reads like an advertisement. - David Scarlett 05:46, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
- Ok, I've removed all mention of the use of jeans for scuba diving. Still can't believe that was in the article for almost 2 years! David Scarlett 11:11, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Joking aside guys, there are plenty of photos of commercial divers in the Gulf Of Mexico wearing jeans... --UD75 23:03, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Argox as suit inflation gas
Does anyone else think that the use of argox as a suit inflation gas is not notable enough to be worthy of mention? Given that argon is highly narcotic, and such a gas would be quite narcotic below about 15m (EAD of 41m) and could quite likely kill the dive if breathed below 30m (EAD 72m), it seems absurd to mention it here. That and the fact that its use is pretty much completely unheard of. See Talk:Argox (scuba) for some discussion on this gas. -- David Scarlett(Talk) 02:03, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
Argox and other exotic diving gases are interesting and worth mentioning but in their own articles, an "exotic gases" article or a section of breathing gas and not in the diving suit article. While it's good to see different angles and the unconventional in articles, argox is too marginal to be useful in an article on diving suits.Mark.murphy 20:27, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
