Breathing underwater without the help of bulky equipment seems unrealistic. At least how unrealistic human flight must have seemed on the eve of Kitty Hawk.
It must be what the designer thought Jun kamei when in 2018 he created Amphibio, a 3D printed wearable accessory that acts as an artificial gill for breathing underwater without tanks. It is not a mask for breathing underwater. There are no underwater breathing masks that can do this. It's just a whole breathing system.
From his intuition one day an alternative way for humans to breathe underwater could really arise.
Kamei, a graduate of the Royal College, has developed an artistic collaboration with the RCA-IIS design laboratory in Tokyo. The result is what you see in the photo. The artificial gill is futuristic and "stylish". When they say "breathe design", even if you have to go underwater to do it.
In the project presentation web pages you can read the genesis of the concept. “I was looking at how the future of our urban environment will change with global warming and became deeply interested in sea level rise figures, and how to breathe underwater.”
design
Let's leave aside the apocalyptic vision for a moment (which seems almost inspired by the Miyazaki of 'Conan, boy of the future'): the object has its own dignity. These are real artificial gills. With a mask breathing underwater is less elegant, do you agree? Usually underwater you swim, you don't breathe.
Amphibio is a two-part 3D printed garment: a sort of vest and a proper mask made of “superhydrophobic” (or extremely water-repellent) material that extracts oxygen from the surrounding water and dissipates carbon dioxide.
amphibio it is a working prototype, not a simple aesthetic exercise: it has even been tested by swimming and doing exercises in an aquarium pool. This underwater breathing mask does exactly what it was designed to do. Yes, it theoretically allows breathing underwater. That is: it's not like breathing water, they're not like fish gills, but almost.
Of course, the proper functioning of the device does not imply that it is currently sufficient for human respiration.
Despite the improvements in recent months, to have enough oxygen for a man to breathe underwater the artificial gills would have to be 32 square meters large. Definitely larger than a couple of cylinders, isn't it? Who knows the difficulty of swimming with this giant sheet.
Kamei has a culprit in mind for this stalemate: us. “The difficulty is our large consumption of oxygen. We humans consume too much. Even though oxygen is dissolved in the water, the rate that must be absorbed during swimming through the gill is enormous, and this makes a very large gill surface area necessary,” the designer said.
Quite right. If we were rodents it would have been easier to breathe in the water, damn us who are human. Beginners!
Recent developments of his concept, still little publicised, speculate on the improvement in performance achievable with the use of membranes made of nanomaterials: instead of increasing the extension of the gills it will be possible to improve the absorption of oxygen and thus achieve breathing in water.
While waiting for the improvement of 3D printing techniques and materials engineering to make Anfibio a sustainable project for breathing underwater, I am sure that this piece of skill will soon find use. More than masks for breathing underwater: gills will have an impact on the recreational sector, or maybe in the military one.
