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As I stated before being fit is better. A fit diver would be able to do a lot more workl either at the surface or depth before incapacitation. CERTAINLY But back to the real world of diving. The Pressure gradient is THE driving force that causes you to ongas inert gasses. But it takes TIME for the gas to pass into the body. This is based on the physics of gas exchange NOT overall fitness. George will be able to move more Gal / Min of blood than the fat guy True !! but blood does not off gas by merely racing thru the alveoli it takles a certain amount of time for the transfer to take place. The blood that comes in contact with the alveoli will have a lower PP of inert gas AFTER passing than just before. If the fat guys blood was circulating so slowly as to completely off gas before passing thru the lung the guy would be dead. The duration of the blood to the alveoli would not be greater. The time would be the same (hang time) The exact same piece of blood would pass thru 4 times as often for george, but the blood goes by so quickly it woulsd not have enough time to dump all its inert gass load. Lets say you had a convyer belt full of buckets that gathered water from a lake & moved over a garden to dump out & water the plants. The buckets hold 5 gal of water each the fat convyr moves 50 buckets per minute. The george convyer 200 / min. These buckets are not dumped on the plants, but leak out slowly through holes in the bottom. Now these buckets can only release their water when they are actually OVER the plants. The water flows out of the buckets at 2 .5gal / min the dwell time of each bucket on the convyer over the garden is one minute for the fat convyer but only 15 sec for the george convyer because it is going 4 Xs faster. Both convyers would dump the same amout of water. fat one 50 Bucket /min X 2.5 Gal/min X 1min = 125 gal George one 200 Bucket/min X 2.5 Gal/Min X .25 Min = 125 gal. The blood does not get to dump all of it's inert gas load each time it passes thru the lung. only part of it. How much of it is determined by the pressure differential & the physics of the gas transfer thru the alveoli. If you blood was able to dump it's full load each time thru the lungs it would only take a few circuts of the blood on pure o2 to completly cleanse the blood of inert gas. While it is true that I have over simplified the gas transfer, you get my drift Captain Zero -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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