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Just called Dive and Surf, the store run by the Meistral's who also run Body Glove. On their suits, the SAS brand, the Ti is a fine flake embedded in the plush layer inside the wetsuit, as somebody mentioned. This guy said that when water penetrated the wetsuit, the Ti captured and stored heat, keeping you warmer longer. Weird. I had thought that the Ti added some insulating property, particularly to radiated heat, as others had mentioned. This would be easy to test by looking at divers with an IR camera (nope, don't have one here). This aspect of the Ti being good because it increases the heat capacity of the liner is interesting. Heat flow can be modeled as electronics or as plumbing. Adding that heat capacity is like adding a capacitor to a circuit or a resevoir to a stream. You don't necessarily slow down current flow, but you do store some up to be used later. Not sure what that gets you. The only way I can really make sense of it is that you dump heat to the Ti when you first put on the suit, before you get in the water. That heat is then used to warm the layer of water that comes into the suit. Testing this would be a little more complex, but all you really need is a good thermometer, preferably digital so you can leave it on your suit sample. Put suit samples on a block of ice, and time the drop in temperature on the samples. The ideal material, an infinite thermal resistor, would stay at room temperature. Let me know if you have some of that and send me a couple yards. What will really happen is that the material will drop to some temp in between room and ice. A thicker conventional material will level off at a warmer temp than the thinner. If my speculation is right about the Ti, it will fall off more slowly than conventional material at first, because it has that stored heat to use up. If the Ti also makes the suit a better insulator, it will not get as cold as the same thickness of a conventional material. If it is not a better insulator, the suit will eventually get just as cold. Running this experiment in real life has a few other factors, like you want to make sure your ice is holding steady at 32 and that your thermometer is measuring the material, not the room, and that it isn't changing the temperatures of the samples with it's own temperature. This is all really speculation on my part. I'm not sure I talked to the right guy at DNS, either. I'll go in for a fill and ask again. Better yet, I think I got a set of gloves at DNS. Could be titanium. If so, the problem is reduced to me wearing two different gloves tonight and drinking two beers and seeing which hand gets colder. Ah, the price we pay for science. | You can't have everything. It's mine. | | Roger Carlson w 310-812-0430 | roger@ch*.sp*.tr*.co* f 310-812-1363 | h 310-frogger
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