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Heliox is a breathing gas mixture of helium (He) and oxygen (O 2).It is used as a medical treatment for patients with difficulty breathing because this mixture generates less resistance than atmospheric air when passing through the airways of the lungs, and thus requires less effort by a patient to breathe in and out of the lungs.
A breathing gas is a mixture of gaseous chemical elements and compounds used for respiration. Air is the most common and only natural breathing gas. Other mixtures of gases, or pure oxygen, are also used in breathing equipment and enclosed habitats such as scuba equipment, surface supplied diving equipment, recompression chambers, high-altitude mountaineering, high-flying aircraft, submarines ...
In underwater diving an inert gas is a component of the breathing mixture which is not metabolically active and serves to dilute the gas mixture. The inert gas may have effects on the diver, but these are thought to be mostly physical effects, such as tissue damage caused by bubbles in decompression sickness .
Hydreliox is an exotic breathing gas mixture of hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. [1] [2] For the Hydra VIII (Hydra 8) mission at 50 atmospheres of ambient pressure, the mixture used was 49% hydrogen, 50.2% helium, and 0.8% oxygen. [3] It is used primarily for research and scientific deep diving, usually below 130 metres (430 ft).
Helium is a commonly used carrier gas for gas chromatography. The age of rocks and minerals that contain uranium and thorium can be estimated by measuring the level of helium with a process known as helium dating. [28] [30] Helium at low temperatures is used in cryogenics and in certain cryogenic applications.
The risk of breathing asphyxiant gases is frequently underestimated leading to fatalities, typically from breathing helium in domestic circumstances and nitrogen in industrial environments. [ 12 ] The term asphyxiation is often mistakenly associated with the strong desire to breathe that occurs if breathing is prevented.
The mixture of helium and oxygen with a 0% nitrogen content is generally known as heliox. This is frequently used as a breathing gas in deep commercial diving operations, where it is often recycled to save the expensive helium component. Analysis of two-component gases is much simpler than three-component gases.
The helium dilution technique is the way of measuring the functional residual capacity of the lungs (the volume left in the lungs after normal expiration). This technique is a closed-circuit system where a spirometer is filled with a mixture of helium (He) and oxygen. The amount of He in the spirometer is known at the beginning of the test ...