Diving experiment in a simulator

The diving simulator can create pressure found at a depth of around 50 m using compressed air, which allows divers and underwater crew to experience this pressure firsthand, and facilitates performance testing of underwater equipment, and so forth.

This facility has also been used for a variety of medical research experiments dealing with the safety of saturation diving, a unique diving developed specifically for deep-sea expeditions.

The experiments used three chambers into which four test subjects were placed at a time for a period of 20 days on average. These three chambers were comprised of: a sub-chamber (complete with toilet and shower) with an inner diameter of 2.5 m; a 7.5 m dry chamber with an inner diameter of 2.2 m that is used as living space; and a wet chamber complete with a 3 m deep pool (used for diving tests, with adjustable water temperature).

Saturation Diving
Normal diving expeditions require long depressurization periods relative to the time actually spent completing work, making traditional methods extremely inefficient. Saturation diving was developed to solve this issue. Saturation diving is a technique whereby the gas within the diver’s bodily tissue is kept at the same constant pressure as the pressure of the environment in which they will be diving. Saturation diving allows diver’s to work at depths safely over long periods (in excess of one month) with no restrictions placed on dive times, so long as the pressurization and depressurization associated with dives and ascents is kept within certain parameters.