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Hi Matthias, It's good to have the list back up so I can hear from you. From: Matthias Voss <mat.voss@t-*.de*> > I do not know this suit. > However, at the boot fair Düsseldorf there was a suit heated by a > 10amphour batterypack, where the heatgenerating fibers were maid out of > carbon filaments. That is pretty much the way this thing works. The suit looks like a diveskin and is made of fleeced PolyPro/Lycra and nylon coated neoprene and has a heating element in the spine. I get the impression that it is very thin, which in the case of neoprene translates to very expensive. The battery pack is six volts and weighs about three pounds. The website had a capacity for it which I don't recall. The pack connects to the suit, has a temperature control, and is available with several mounting options. How it does that without punching a hole in the drysuit or making a seal into a leak is a mystery to me. > There was also a suit who's designer claimed a capability of chemically > storing latent enrgy and rendering heat in the very moment the > temperature dropped below a trigger point. You may have seen this very > design with cars, where the cooling system serves to heat > natriumsomething crystals, which in turn give this energy back on > demand. If you could have a material with a melting point around 90 degrees and enough specific heat, you could wear a vest of the stuff under your drysuit and go the first part of the dive on sensible heat and the rest of the dive on the latent heat given off as the material solidifies. I know of no material with a high enough specific heat to do that. Every once in a while I see a report of someone using a couple of those chemical heat packs inside a drysuit. The reason I see the report is that the packs supposedly got salt water on them and burned the hell out of the diver. I have no idea if those packs actually do that. I'll have to dunk one in a bucket of seawater in the backyard one day and find out. The thing about this rig that got my attention was that the suits put no heat on the head, hands, or feet. The heating element is at the spine. I _always_ feel the cold in my feet, hands, or head. The only time my spine is the first part of me to get cold is when I am changing the oil in my truck in my driveway in February. :) Don Shop online without a credit card http://www.rocketcash.com RocketCash, a NetZero subsidiary -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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