thebuoyancyofafloodeddry-suit,archimedeslawand（11页）.docVIP

The buoyancy of a flooded dry-suit, Archimedes law and dolphins’ bubbles Doron Nof Department of Earth, Oceans and Atmospheric Sciences Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306 02/21/2011 Using a simple “barrel” model we address the question of how much buoyancy is lost when a dry-suit is flooded. We show that, contrary to common ideas, this question does not have a trivial or a straightforward answer though, in most relevant cases, a suit will not lose more than 30% of its buoyancy. The dry-suit flooding issue is often discussed in various online forums. Most of the statements made on those public forums are, at the very least, misleading, contradictory, and most times just dead wrong. Examples are: water suspended in water (i.e., a flooded dry-suit) does not add any weight to the diver, or “the weight of any water in the suit is nil, until you try and leave the water”. These statements imply that suits do not lose any buoyancy due to flooding. One also finds statements that dry-suits become excessively heavy due to tears. They are often mistakenly attributed to Archimedes law, which states that the buoyancy of a submerged object is equal to the weight of the fluid that is displaced. Of course, some comments made in those public forums are correct (e.g., a suit cannot lose more buoyancy that it originally had). Still, most statements do not seem to distinguish between scooters, which are not pressurized and have no net buoyancy, to suits, which are pressurized and have a lot of net buoyancy. It is perhaps not surprising that the various forums are full with confusing information because the problem of buoyancy loss in a dry suit is not a trivial one. We show here that the buoyancy of a flooded suit depends on three aspects: The location of the tear. By this we mean the upper part of the suit that faces upward, (i.e., toward the surface) or the lower part of the suit that faces downward. The depth where the tear occurs. Whether the v