A Study of Temperature Gradients Inside a Horizontal Cylinder With Heated and Recirculated Diving Gas Mixtures

Abstract

There is little data available in the literature regarding temperature gradients and heat transfer in diving chambers (decompression chambers) with an environment of normal diving mixtures of helium and oxygen at pressures up to 33 atm. This paper reports on a preliminary study that was made to determine the actual behavior of the gas mix-tures in a model chamber as compared to predicted behavior. It was hypothesized that three distinct regions of flow are developed from the circulation of the environmental gas. Equations were developed for the temperature profiles and checked by the model data. Agreement between theory and test data was quite good. The test procedure and instrumentation are described in part. Full details and data are available in reference [18].