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Helium conducts heat six times faster than air, so helium-breathing divers often carry a separate supply of a different gas to inflate drysuits.This is to avoid the risk of hypothermia caused by using helium as inflator gas.
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.
Helium has a higher heat conductivity than nitrogen and oxygen, but has a lower specific heat, so heat loss to helium based breathing gases is less than to air or nitrox. [22] This heat loss to breathing gas compounds the risk of hypothermia already present in the cold temperatures usually found at greater depths.
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 ...
Analysing a trimix blend using a portable helium analyzer Two oxygen cells as used by oxygen anylysers for diving gas Oxygen and helium analyser for breathing gas for diving. Before a gas mix leaves the blending station and before the diver breathes from it, the fraction of oxygen in the mix should be checked.
Head loss to the breathing gas is slightly reduced by helium content of the breathing gas, as although it has greater thermal conductivity, its heat capacity is lower than nitrogen. [15] [16] According to Pollock (2023) the unprotected adult human takes somewhere in the order of 30 minutes to become hypothermic in near freezing water.
Inhaling helium can be dangerous if done to excess, since helium is a simple asphyxiant and so displaces oxygen needed for normal respiration. [28] [186] Fatalities have been recorded, including a youth who suffocated in Vancouver in 2003 and two adults who suffocated in South Florida in 2006.
High-pressure nervous syndrome (HPNS) is a neurological and physiological diving disorder that results when a diver descends below about 500 feet (150 m) using a breathing gas containing helium. The effects experienced, and the severity of those effects, depend on the rate of descent, the depth and percentage of helium.