Debunked: Triton Artificial Gills (Indigogo Campaign)

huwp

Member
[Update May 8 2016]
After it raised over $600K, Indigogo have suspended the Triton 'artificial gills' campaign and refunded all the contrbutions, issuing the following statement:
Over a month ago, our Trust and Safety team reached out to the Triton team in response to numerous questions from our community surrounding the the claims made in their most recent campaign. Despite our repeated requests to substantiate these claims, the Triton team have not been able to comply, and we have decided to refund all contributions to the campaign."
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Discussed in this thread starting here.

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Original Post follows:

Claim:
Currently trending on Indiegogo is a campaign for an 'artificial gills' product called Triton:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/triton-world-s-first-artificial-gills-re-breather#/
At time of writing, this has attracted over 1,400 backers and over half a million US$.

The campaign claims: "Triton. A state-of-the-art oxygen respirator, that allows you to breathe underwater by utilizing our ‘artificial gills’ technology. Swim among tropical fish, marvel at exotic coral and experience the serene beauty of marine life − without having to come up for air"

The device is claimed to "extract enough oxygen for a human to comfortably breathe underwater", by extracting dissolved oxygen from water using "Microporous Hollow Fiber. This is the pioneering technology that keeps water molecules out, and lets oxygen in", powered by a "modified lithium-ion battery" running a "modified micro compressor". Use in seawater is explicitly stated to be OK. Product photos and a short video are offered as evidence. They claim to have a working prototype.

History: Some people may remember the design from a viral 'news' item from couple of years ago. This was widely reported, including on reputable news sites, as if it was a real thing, however it eventually emerged that it was in fact purely a mock-up concept design produced by a student. The concept was explained to be so impractical as to be effectively impossible by a few people at the time. Now the design is back, this time apparently for sale. The uncritical previous news reports are the source of the 'quotes' on the indegogo page.

Debunk: The device shown cannot work as described (and even if it did, it would be extremely dangerous), there is simply too little dissolved gas in water to allow the principle to work in any practical way. The video presented is fake. There is no working prototype.

Evidence that the device cannot work as described:Note that the device is specifically claimed to allow a person to breathe comfortably, NOT that it performs any other more obscure actions to deliver metabolically required O2 and remove CO2 from the body.

Human adults have a lung tidal volume (the volume of air you breathe in and out each breath) of about 500ml. [1]. Adult divers in a relaxed state will breathe a total of very roughly 15 litres of gas in aggregate every minute at the surface. This increases with exertion. If tidal volume is restricted, humans become unable to effectively flush CO2 produced by metabolic activity from the lungs and will become hypercapnic, quickly leading to distress and death.

Sea water contains very roughly 6ml of dissolved oxygen gas and 12ml of dissolved nitrogen gas per litre, at 15 degrees C (60 degrees F). [2] [3]. Less in warmer water.

So the device would have to process around 27 litres (7 gallons) of seawater to extract enough dissolved gas to allow an adult to take a single breath, at the surface, assuming perfect efficiency. It would have to process 800 litres (28 cubic feet) of seawater to allow an adult to breathe for one minute at the surface. This is the approximate flow rate of twenty garden hoses or one fire hose through the device.

Flow rate would have to increase with increased exertion, warmer water, reduced efficiency or increased depth. At the 15 feet max depth claimed for the device, in tropical water with mild exertion and a generous 50% efficiency this could quickly become 4,000 litres per minute, or the flow rate of five fire hoses. (Powered by a device the size of a mobile phone...) The thrust that this produced would move a diver rapidly and uncontrollably, if they could even retain it in their mouth (do ask a fireman to hold their fire hose in their teeth...)

This is giving the benefit of the doubt that the device can extract both oxygen and nitrogen (...and no other dissolved substances such as carbon dioxide, chlorine or pollutants) from the water to allow a person to breathe. If it really is just to extract oxygen as it states on the web page, then the above calculations of flow rate need to be tripled.

Evidence for fake video: The diver in the presented video shows no sign of being moved by the force of multiple fire hoses of water processed through the device. Although the diver appears to be producing bubbles at intervals, the volume of bubbles each time is tiny compared to a full exhale. He is noticeably buoyant (having difficulty staying submerged) at the start of the video, and becomes neutrally buoyant towards the end. The explanation for this is that he took a full breath before the start of the video, and is letting it out in short bursts, NOT breathing from the device. He becomes less buoyant as his lungs empty. The entire video is shorter than the length of an un-challenging breath hold.

Evidence for dangerous: Humans cannot detect when the gas they are breathing becomes hypoxic. (Pilots train for this in case of depressurisation, and this is why airlines advise you to put your own mask on before helping others. The urge to breathe is driven by rising CO2, not falling O2 levels.) If a diver using this device moved into an area of water depleted of oxygen, they would have no way of detecting it until they fell unconscious from hypoxia (which is not a good thing underwater). Once water had been processed through the device it would be depleted of dissolved gas so a diver would have to constantly move in search of fresh water, without any way of knowing where that might be.

So how do fish manage this trick with gills? Simple answer - they are cold blooded, require a tiny fraction of the oxygen we warm-blooded mammals require for metabolism, and can remove CO2 from their bodies also using their gills, not lung ventilation.

Final note that the Indegogo page specifically places the responsibility for due diligence on to backers; it also states that the project will recieve all funds even if it does not reach all goals. Caveat emptor.

Another couple of debunks of the concept along similar lines:
http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/01/triton-not-dive-or-dive-not-there-is-no-triton/
http://www.nigelhewitt.co.uk/diving/rant/index.html#gills

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_volume
[2] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/oxygen-solubility-water-d_841.html
[3] http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Re-St/Sea-Water-Gases-in.html

[UPDATE: 4/1/2016]

So, to recap, not only have "Triton" debunked their own claim (the previous claim was clearly that the artificial gills themselves allowed a person to breathe comfortably, no mention of single use consumeable canisters), but they have doubled down on bizarre claims (liquid oxygen!), and a new video already debunked as fake with a hidden air tube.

For another factual debunk of the latest permutation of the claim, we can calculate the volume of liquid oxygen that would be required to allow a human to breathe for 45 minutes. Firstly remember that the volume of gas required to "allow a human to breathe comfortably" is in the region of 15 litres a minute (driven by the need to flush CO2 from the lungs). Over 45 minutes, that totals to 675 litres.

The expansion ratio of liquid oxygen to oxygen gas at one atmosphere pressure is 1:861, so you would need just under 0.78 litres of LOx to create 675 litres of oxygen gas. The brand new campaign page claims the canisters are useable for two 45 minute dives, so double the LOx to 1.6 litres.

The triton page gives the dimensions of the device as 29cm x 12cm. It doesn't give a height, but 4cm might be reasonable, given that it easily fits between the nose and chin of the subject in the video. That gives a total envelope volume of roughly 1,400 cubic centimetres or 1.4 litres. The device itself is much smaller than the total envelope, as most of the length is taken up by the 'gills' part of the design which are slim tubes.

So you'd need a volume of liquid oxygen at least a couple of times larger than the entire device to allow breathing, before adding any other components - such as, you know, the pressurised, insulated container to allow the liquid oxygen to be stored in the first place, and the 'micro compressor' and gills that they are STILL maintaining that the device contains AND uses.

So the brand new campaign is up to US$115,000 already after just a few hours... I could go on and on, including that this device would be much more dangerous to the untrained than even normal SCUBA gear due to the delivery of pure oxygen (see above for the risks of central nervous system toxicity) even though they are still claiming it doesn't require any training, the challenges of warming that liquid oxygen to a point where it wouldn't instantly cryogenically freeze your lungs as soon as you breathe in, the sheer impracticality of the canisters (there is no way you are getting one of those on a plane. They haven't clarified how much the canisters might cost - which might be why they had to refund and restart the campaign?) etc etc but I'm not sure it would make any difference.

Update 4-17-2016: A demonstration of how the videos might have been faked. The first part uses a hidden hose and air tank, and the second part is a demonstration of an idea for making a more convincing video using a very small air tank hidden in the far side of the waistband of the diver's shorts, with a hose running underneath his top.
 
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He is noticeably buoyant (having difficulty staying submerged) at the start of the video, and becomes neutrally buoyant towards the end. The explanation for this is that he took a full breath before the start of the video, and is letting it out in short bursts, NOT breathing from the device
yea, even i can hold my breath underwater for 30s seconds. In the 2nd video link (with all swimming and no sell),
it's actually 3 segments. the longest segment was 1:03-1:50 minutes.

kinda strange that a device that can last 45 minutes only has a underwater segment less than a minute shown.
Wonder why they didnt just hire a pearl diver so they could get a few consecutive minutes on video out there.
 
There is to add: beside the huge amount of water the device would have to pump trough. Think about the power this "megapump" would need to function longer than a few minutes. A scuba tank might be a better option for diving than to carry a car-battery around.
 
I don't think a car battery would power a pump of that capacity for very long, or at all.

According to this page http://www.fireapparatusmagazine.co...tments/pump-talk/pump-power-requirements.html powering a 1,500 gallons-per-minute pump requires 186 horsepower, so extrapolating, our 1,000 gallons per minute requirement would need around 120 horsepower or around 90,000 watts. A typical car battery seems to be about 500 watts, so you'd need 180 car batteries just to power the pump. This isn't my area of expertise so I'm happy to be corrected, but I think I'm safe in stating that it isn't going to fit in something you want to carry in your mouth.

Edit - coming at this another way, here http://www.myozeshop.com.au/product...nt=985648896&gclid=CJnMzvy31ssCFZcRvQod6IEC6A is a 800W pump that can achieve 50L/min. So we'd need 80 of these pumps to shift 4,000 L/min, total power 64,000 watts, which is in the same order of magnitude as the above. Still not fitting in a mouthpiece.
 
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I don't think a car battery would power a pump of that capacity for very long, or at all.

According to this page http://www.fireapparatusmagazine.co...tments/pump-talk/pump-power-requirements.html powering a 1,500 gallons-per-minute pump requires 186 horsepower, so extrapolating, our 1,000 gallons per minute requirement would need around 120 horsepower or around 90,000 watts. A typical car battery seems to be about 500 watts, so you'd need 180 car batteries just to power the pump. This isn't my area of expertise so I'm happy to be corrected, but I think I'm safe in stating that it isn't going to fit in something you want to carry in your mouth.

Edit - coming at this another way, here http://www.myozeshop.com.au/product...nt=985648896&gclid=CJnMzvy31ssCFZcRvQod6IEC6A is a 800W pump that can achieve 50L/min. So we'd need 80 of these pumps to shift 4,000 L/min, total power 64,000 watts, which is in the same order of magnitude as the above. Still not fitting in a mouthpiece.

If you're going for that kind of power, why not just electrolyse the water and get oxygen that way? :)

Just a rough calculation for the power required:

Enthalpy of formation of water at 25ºC = -286 kJ/mol

1 mole of oxygen at standard temperature and pressure takes up 22.4 litres.

So to get 15 litres of oxygen per minute you need to generate 15 / 22.4 = 0.67 mol of oxygen

1 mole of water (H2​O) yields ½ mole of oxygen (O2​).

So you need to split 0.67 x 2 = 1.34 moles of water per minute, at an energy cost of 286 kJ/mol x 1.34 mol = 383 kJ.

So, assuming 100% efficiency, you need 383 kJ per minute, or 6.4 kJ per second, i.e. 6.4 kilowatts.

It would probably double up as a portable water heater too :)

Breathing pure oxygen would be a bad idea, too of course, but maybe you could take a tank of nitrogen and mix it.


And of course, it's already been thought of. http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US3504669

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION This invention provides apparatus for generating oxygen by decomposition of water taken from that surrounding a diver and the oxygen is suppled to the mask or helmet worn by the diver. The water is subjected to the flow of electric current between electrodes in a chamber which is preferably a pocket of a wet suit or other apparel worn by the diver.
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That patent suggests an umbilical to provide the necessary power.

For long dives, where it is not practical to carry batteries of sufficient capacity for the period of immersion, an insulated conductor can be connected with the oxygen generator and supplied with electric power from a ship.
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For long dives, where it is not practical to carry batteries of sufficient capacity for the period of immersion, an insulated conductor can be connected with the oxygen generator and supplied with electric power from a ship.
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Am I understanding this right, supplied with electric power from a ship, means by cable?
(I mean, what else could it be?)
If yes, why bother with creating oxygen, if you could pump it through a second cable anyway?
 

For long dives, where it is not practical to carry batteries of sufficient capacity for the period of immersion, an insulated conductor can be connected with the oxygen generator and supplied with electric power from a ship.
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Am I understanding this right, supplied with electric power from a ship, means by cable?
(I mean, what else could it be?)
If yes, why bother with creating oxygen, if you could pump it through a second cable anyway?

Yes, exactly. Patents don't have to be useful, or practical. :)

I thought of the idea, assuming that the power requirements would be excessive. Then I did the calculations and looked to see if anyone else had come up with the idea. That patent was filed almost 50 years ago and still hasn't been put into practice. I wonder why...
 
That patent was filed almost 50 years ago and still hasn't been put into practice. I wonder why...

I also thought about electrolysis of water to produce oxygen gas, but did not bother to post this idea. From personal experience gained in my school years, the electrolysis of salty water generates plenty of chlorine gas on the same electrode as oxygen. It takes less energy to reduce oxidise chlorine ion (Cl-) than to split water to oxygen and hydrogen.
 
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I also thought about electrolysis of water to produce oxygen gas, but did not bother to post this idea. From personal experience gained in my school years, the electrolysis of salty water generates plenty of chlorine gas on the same electrode as oxygen. It takes less energy to reduce chlorine ion (Cl-) than to split water to oxygen and hydrogen.

Yes, I hadn't considered that. Breathing in chlorine gas might be a deal-breaker. :(

But wait: we can just build in a portable desalination unit and feed the output from that into the electrolyser!
 
Hmm, how far from planning a submarine are we right now? :D
Two steps:

1. You'll need an air tight vessel to keep the deep cycle batteries that run this dry.
2. At this point, the whole thing will be too heavy to carry so it'll need its own propulsion and a means to alter its buoyancy to rise and sink.

I don't think submarines ever use electrolysis to get their oxygen, though. Chlorine gas is the enemy of machinery. But, yeah, at this point you've built a submarine.
 
Breathing pure oxygen would be a bad idea, too of course, but maybe you could take a tank of nitrogen and mix it.

Actually, breathing pure O2 would be pretty much OK down to the 15 feet/4.5m max depth claimed for the device, within the 45 minutes claimed maximum duration. However the risk would ramp up rapidly beyond that depth, with the main danger being central nervous system toxicity which can lead to convulsions and unconsciousness (which is considered to be Not A Good Thing underwater). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity. The 15 feet max depth claimed for the device looks to be a Reassuringly Precise specification they have stumbled on to add an impression of legitimacy to the campaign.

Technical divers can use pure Oxygen during the last part of an ascent from a deep dive to shorten their required decompression time. The maximum depth I'll personally use pure O2 at is 6m, and at that depth we would do a routine of 12 minutes on, 6 minutes off repeated to reduce the CNS toxicity risk. (In 99.9% of cases where you read a news article about a SCUBA diver's "Oxygen tanks" this is just sloppy journalism - the vast majority of SCUBA tanks contain air, actual use of Oxygen is a pretty advanced diving technique.)

I mean, when talking about the dangers the device would pose if it was real we didn't even discuss oxygen convolutions when some yahoo exceeded the depth limit while seeing how deep they could go on the thing (or just by accident, since they have no training and probably no depth gauge so wouldn't even know how deep they were). Or the risk of lung over-expansion injury or arterial gas embolism if they held one of those breaths and swam for the surface...
 
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Just a rough calculation for the power required:
Enthalpy of formation of water at 25ºC = -286 kJ/mol...
The calculation can be done much simpler and more comprehensible for an average bloke:

At a moderate effort, a diver consumes ~30 l/min of air on the surface. In the depth of 3m, it would correspond to ~40 l/air. One liter of air contains ~300 mg of oxygen. One liter of well oxygenated water contains ~6 mg of oxygen. To assure the same PPO₂ with the gills you would have to filter 2,000 liters of water per minute (40*300/6). That corresponds to the water flow of 33 liters per second! And I assume 100% efficiency of the filtering, which is nonsense, of course too. In reality the needed flow might need to be up to ~10 times higher.

For a comparison a big truck-mounted water cannon used for riot suppression has the water flow of 20 l/s and needs hell of a pump to achieve it. And all that without the need to pass the water through a molecular filter which would require orders of magnitude more power. Having such thing in your mouth would decapitate you or at least rip out your teeth immediately.

Further they claim "With Triton there’s no heavy equipment, complicated safety procedures or training." - that another plain nonsence. Not only breathing pure oxygen requires quite strict limitations and a special certificates, but any underwater breathing apparatus poses an enormous risk of a barotrauma in case of emergency surfacing, when the diver omits exhaling. Inhaling even just at 3m underwater and surfacing with that pressure in lungs can seriously injure your lungs, and can kill you. Every diver knows that very well.

More nonsense: "The holes of the threads are smaller than water molecules, they keep water out and let oxygen in." - molecules of O₂ are in fact bigger than molecules of H₂O, so the claim is nonsense. Water would pass through, while O₂ with most of the remaining dissolved gases and impurities (i.e. the salt!) would remain on the nano-filter. Besides it, the filter would be clogged with the salt and/or with other impurities very quickly.

Another stupidity - to allow the diver to breathe, there would have to be a reservoir keeping a full lungs (or at least ½ lungs) volume of air (or oxygen) - 2-6 liter of reservoir. There is no way you could achieve it in the device of this size without compressing the gas to some ~100 bar, which is impossible at such a small battery-powered device.

In the pool video, the longest sequence is not 1 minute long as written by Deirde, it is only 30s long 47 seconds long. I am a certified freediving (breath-hold diving) monitor and a freediving competitor. I can keep swimming and exhaling for 2-3 minutes, and within a weekend can teach any beginner to do so for about a minute.

EDIT: I've found the Indiegogo campaign already a few days ago, and immediately have sent a complaint to Indiegogo. Recently they took down another campaign upon my complaint, so I know they do react sometimes, so I hope they will pull down this hoax quickly. Today there is already well over $600K raised!
 
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Yes, right. 47s (if the video was not slowed down a bit). That's still within the reach of any beginner with just the basic training in freediving (including the exhaling, of course, too).
 
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The calculation can be done much simpler and more comprehensible for an average bloke:
My calculations related to electrolysis of water to make oxygen - not the extraction of dissolved oxygen as claimed by this "invention". My point was just that if you are going to use all that power you could get oxygen directly from splitting water.

You make a very good point, which I had missed, about water molecules being bigger than oxygen molecules. That's not intuitively obvious: water is hydrogen plus oxygen, so why is it bigger than just oxygen?

The reason, of course, is that water is H₂O, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, whereas oxygen is O₂, two oxygen atoms. Hydrogen atoms are small compared to oxygen atoms (they are the smallest of any atoms).
 
1 mole of water (H2O) yields ½ mole of oxygen (O2).
I was under the belief that a mole is simply a constant number of things, so that one mole of water molecules contains 3 moles of atoms; 2 moles of hydrogen and one mole of oxygen.
 
I was under the belief that a mole is simply a constant number of things, so that one mole of water molecules contains 3 moles of atoms; 2 moles of hydrogen and one mole of oxygen.
It is.

But when we say "a mole of a substance" we mean "a mole of the elementary building blocks of that substance", be it atoms or molecules.

So one mole of water is 6.02 x 1023​ water molecules. And one mole of oxygen is 6.02 x 1023​ oxygen molecules. The key point is that oxygen gas is made up of oxygen molecules (O2​), not individual oxygen atoms.

A water molecule (H2​O) has only one oxygen atom, whereas an oxygen molecule (O2​) has two oxygen atoms. So if you split up one mole of water molecules, you will only get half a mole of oxygen molecules (and one mole of hydrogen molecules, H2​).

(Explanation of moles: One mole of something is a quantity of roughly 6.02 x 1023​ of that thing. That number, known as Avogadro's constant, was chosen so that the mass (in grams) of 1 mole of the substance is the same as its atomic (or molecular) mass. So, for example, one mole of carbon, which has an atomic mass of 12, weighs 12 grams.)
 
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Regarding how such a device might be faked, here's a video of an "Underwater breathing device" that's not too much bigger, and uses weakly compressed air to supply a few (likely 1 or 2) breaths of air underwater.



20160324-061201-buvoi.jpg

Of course you could also just take a deep breath and exhale gradually, as suggested above.
 
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Yes, right. 47s (if the video was not slowed down a bit). That's still within the reach of any beginner with just the basic training in freediving (including the exhaling, of course, too).

I just tried, from rest, taking four deep breaths, then a deep breath which I held. Then every ten seconds exhaling a bit. I managed 94 seconds (9 exhalations). It's not difficult at all.
 
I just tried, from rest, taking four deep breaths, then a deep breath which I held. Then every ten seconds exhaling a bit. I managed 94 seconds (9 exhalations). It's not difficult at all.
Yes, while in rest, ~90s is not difficult, even it it may sound so for many. And as I wrote, even when moving with moderate effort, a minute is within the reach for a beginner with a brief training. Top freedivers can swim underwater hundreds of meters for 5 minutes or more on a single breath. And if you inhale a few times before the dive from an oxygen bottle, you would easily hold your breath 2-3 times longer than that. The best static breath-hold (plain-air) is 12'11", while with oxygen it is over 24 minutes (and the main problem at oxygen breath-holds is not the hypoxia, but rather the hypercapnia - the extreme excess of CO2). Dynamic breath-holds are shorter, but commonly many minutes long too, at skilled freedivers. So even if the video sequence lasted 10 minutes, it could still have been easily done by an average freediver with a little help of prior oxygen inhalation.

BTW, the four or five deep breaths before the breath-hold are called hyperventilation. Very dangerous technique. Although it helps to suppress the early urge to breathe, it is counter-productive and can easily lead to a premature blackout without any prior warning signs. We strongly discourage anyone from preparing to a beath-hold in this way - it is the most common cause of fatal accidents among recreational snorkelers or spearfishers.
 
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Regarding how such a device might be faked, here's a video of an "Underwater breathing device" that's not too much bigger, and uses weakly compressed air to supply a few (likely 1 or 2) breaths of air underwater.
I doubt the small plastic bottles contain enough air for even a single breath. Seeing their dimensions, they have no more than ~100ml each (200ml together, very likely much less), and with the two pumping strokes shown on the video, the air is perhaps compressed to some 1.5 bar at the very best (probably even less). Already at the depth of 5 meters, the pressure would be equal to the the ambient pressure, hence you could not pull any air from it, at all. At the depth of 3m you could get out of it some 40 ml of air. That's about 0.6% of a full breath of an adult man. Even if the bottles were a bit bigger, and the pressure perhaps 2 bars, it would not change much - you'd be still around 1-2% of the lung volume. You better just take a bit deeper breath. The buoyancy of the bottles would just make you spend more energy and burn more air, cutting your underwater time shorter. It is just another lame hoax.
 
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The buoyancy of the bottles would just make you spend more energy and burn more air, cutting your underwater time shorter. It is just another lame hoax.

Yes, it's silly and impractical, I was thinking more as a source of the bubbles - but really simple exhalations are the only explanation that is needed. Occam's razor.
 
A few days ago I reported the scam to Indiegogo, and earlier today I have received an answer from them telling that they are reviewing the campaign, but I am a bit disappointed they did not suspend it yet. I am little bit afraid that as they get certainly some commission from the payments, they are not too keen to cut their own supply. When I reported the fraudulent campaign of ADGEX, they have blocked them rather promptly, but there were only some $200 at stake. In the meantime the funding of Triton rose to $633K. Does anyone here know whether the inventor has the access to the donations continuously, or only once the campaign is closed? If they can withdraw the funds as they flow in, I am afraid all those ~1600 investors are already screwed.
 
Does anyone here know whether the inventor has the access to the donations continuously, or only once the campaign is closed? If they can withdraw the funds as they flow in, I am afraid all those ~1600 investors are already screwed.

You can only get the money once the campaign ends.

https://support.indiegogo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204484508-When-Do-I-Get-My-Money-

Indiegogo offers two types of funding structures: Fixed and Flexible. For both funding types, contributions are held until the end of your campaign and then sent to your bank or PayPal account within 15 business days after your campaign has ended.
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Nice. In that case I do not expect Indiegogo releasing the funds to Triton - they still have a month to check it. Since Triton has their prototype, they can simply arrange a testing session with an Indiegogo agent to prove it works.
 
Contributors can contact Indiegogo before the campaign closes to withdraw contributions, as well, as long as the campaign isn't closed and no perks have been fulfilled.
Yes, I saw this, when I reported about the Indiegogo campaign of ADGEX in the FB ELFE owner group - a member first contributed and then withdrew his funds, when warned, before Indiegogo suspended the campaign.
 
OK, so Tritons are not only scammers, but they seem to be thieves too. Although not identical, their logo is quite apparently stolen from the music band Tritone:

The logos of the Tritone Music Band (left) and Triton gills (right):

tritone.png triton.png

While the logo of the band appears in this form since minimally May 2015 (and in a slightly different but similar form for much longer), I could not find any versions of the logo of Tritongills older than a few weeks, hence it seems to be quite apparent who took the inspiration where.
 
I just tried, from rest, taking four deep breaths, then a deep breath which I held. Then every ten seconds exhaling a bit. I managed 94 seconds (9 exhalations). It's not difficult at all.
Even I managed 32secs, and I'm an unfit 53 year old heavy smoker.
 
The world record for static apnea (breath hold while staying still) is 11 minutes 35 seconds without prior oxygen breathing, and 23 minutes, 9 seconds after pre-breathing oxygen.

The record for dynamic no-fins apnea (swimming horizontally with no fins while breathholding) is 232m.

So you can be sure that swimming half a length of a pool and letting out a couple of burps of bubbles is not exactly stretching the limits of human endurance.

Records: http://www.aidainternational.org/ranking
 
The world record for static apnea (breath hold while staying still) is 11 minutes 35 seconds without prior oxygen breathing, and 23 minutes, 9 seconds after pre-breathing oxygen.
As I already wrote, the best static performances are even a bit better - 12'11" was only ratified as an AIDA national record, due to the lack of international referees at that event, and 11'54" by the same freediver, ratified by Guinness. Branko also holds all AIDA and CMAS records of static apnea made during national and international competitions. And with oxygen, 24 minutes (which is not any official AIDA or CMAS discipline) were already surpassed too.

And just for the reference, at the dynamic no-fins performances, the speed is a bit above 1m/s, so the 232m long swim by Dave Mullins took almost 5 minutes. Branko Petrovic, when spearfishing, dives for up to 7 minutes long on one breath. Below the 232m DNF (Dynamic No Fins) record of Dave Mullins (also "just" a national record due to the lack of international referees):

 
just received Indiegogo's non reply to my request to take down the Triton campaign, for which they are currently holding the better part of a million dollars, as follows:

"Hi there,

Thank you for sharing your concern with us. At this time, the campaign is under review to ensure that it adheres to our Terms of Use (http://www.indiegogo.com/about/terms). We will follow up with you if we have any further questions.

So what happens now? We will include the information you have provided along with all other information at our disposal in our review of the campaign. In some cases, we will contact the campaign owner to have them edit their campaign and it will remain on our platform. If the project doesn't follow our rules, we may remove the campaign. We may also restrict the campaign owner's future activities on Indiegogo.

To protect our users' privacy, we're unable to share the action we take. At Indiegogo, we take the trust and safety of our community very seriously, and we greatly appreciate your patience and understanding throughout this review process. To learn more about Indiegogo’s Trust & Safety effort, please visit: www.indiegogo.com/trust

Please note that you do not need to contact us again. Doing so would create a new ticket and prolong the process. Thank you again for taking the time to get in touch with us and for helping to keep Indiegogo a safe and secure platform."
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Yes, I've got the same email a few days ago too. I think they will take their time - they received a lot of money, so they will likely not hurry to give it up. In the meantime, they cash in the interest. I wonder whether we should not denounce the crooks directly to the authorities, and Indiegogo along with them as accomplices - they were made aware of the scam a week ago, with sufficient evidence, but they continue collecting the money from the victims anyway.
 
Business Insider has done an article
March 24, 2016


One of them is Neal Pollock, a research associate at the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology at Duke University Medical Center, and the research director for the Divers Alert Network — a non-profit organization that helps divers in medical emergencies and promotes dive safety.


............

Regardless, Pollock notes the technological challenges involved in creating a device like Triton are so vast that "it's not realistic, it's science fiction" — more in the realm of James Bond in "Thunderball" or Jedi knights in "Star Wars: Episode I."

.........................
Thaler, who evaluates ocean-based crowdfunding campaigns on the website
Southern Fried Science, points out there a number of red flags

http://www.businessinsider.com/can-triton-device-indiegogo-pull-oxygen-water-2016-3/?r=AU&IR=T
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I have the same stock reply from indiegogo, but if they are reviewing multiple reports there is more chance of them taking an investigation seriously.

More critical articles are appearing in Google search results, meanwhile the 'company' are industriously deleting critical or questioning comments on their social media.
 
I have the same stock reply from indiegogo, but if they are reviewing multiple reports there is more chance of them taking an investigation seriously.

More critical articles are appearing in Google search results, meanwhile the 'company' are industriously deleting critical or questioning comments on their social media.
you can install an archive bookmark in your browser, so you can verify such claims. https://archive.is/

i still see questioning comments...
ex: https://archive.is/MdEX2
 
I've lurked for a while and enjoyed reading the factual approach taken here (not to mention being bemused by many of the claims under discussion). For my first post, one where I feel I have something concrete to add:

Claim: Currently trending on Indiegogo is a campaign for an 'artificial gills' product called Triton:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/triton-world-s-first-artificial-gills-re-breather#/
At time of writing, this has attracted over 1,400 backers and over half a million US$.

The campaign claims: "Triton. A state-of-the-art oxygen respirator, that allows you to breathe underwater by utilizing our ‘artificial gills’ technology. Swim among tropical fish, marvel at exotic coral and experience the serene beauty of marine life − without having to come up for air"

The device is claimed to "extract enough oxygen for a human to comfortably breathe underwater", by extracting dissolved oxygen from water using "Microporous Hollow Fiber. This is the pioneering technology that keeps water molecules out, and lets oxygen in", powered by a "modified lithium-ion battery" running a "modified micro compressor". Use in seawater is explicitly stated to be OK. Product photos and a short video are offered as evidence. They claim to have a working prototype.

History: Some people may remember the design from a viral 'news' item from couple of years ago. This was widely reported, including on reputable news sites, as if it was a real thing, however it eventually emerged that it was in fact purely a mock-up concept design produced by a student. The concept was explained to be so impractical as to be effectively impossible by a few people at the time. Now the design is back, this time apparently for sale. The uncritical previous news reports are the source of the 'quotes' on the indegogo page.

Debunk: The device shown cannot work as described (and even if it did, it would be extremely dangerous), there is simply too little dissolved gas in water to allow the principle to work in any practical way. The video presented is fake. There is no working prototype.

Evidence that the device cannot work as described:Note that the device is specifically claimed to allow a person to breathe comfortably, NOT that it performs any other more obscure actions to deliver metabolically required O2 and remove CO2 from the body.

Human adults have a lung tidal volume (the volume of air you breathe in and out each breath) of about 500ml. [1]. Adult divers in a relaxed state will breathe a total of very roughly 15 litres of gas in aggregate every minute at the surface. This increases with exertion. If tidal volume is restricted, humans become unable to effectively flush CO2 produced by metabolic activity from the lungs and will become hypercapnic, quickly leading to distress and death.

Sea water contains very roughly 6ml of dissolved oxygen gas and 12ml of dissolved nitrogen gas per litre, at 15 degrees C (60 degrees F). [2] [3]. Less in warmer water.

So the device would have to process around 27 litres (7 gallons) of seawater to extract enough dissolved gas to allow an adult to take a single breath, at the surface, assuming perfect efficiency. It would have to process 800 litres (28 cubic feet) of seawater to allow an adult to breathe for one minute at the surface. This is the approximate flow rate of twenty garden hoses or one fire hose through the device.

Flow rate would have to increase with increased exertion, warmer water, reduced efficiency or increased depth. At the 15 feet max depth claimed for the device, in tropical water with mild exertion and a generous 50% efficiency this could quickly become 4,000 litres per minute, or the flow rate of five fire hoses. (Powered by a device the size of a mobile phone...) The thrust that this produced would move a diver rapidly and uncontrollably, if they could even retain it in their mouth (do ask a fireman to hold their fire hose in their teeth...)

This is giving the benefit of the doubt that the device can extract both oxygen and nitrogen (...and no other dissolved substances such as carbon dioxide, chlorine or pollutants) from the water to allow a person to breathe. If it really is just to extract oxygen as it states on the web page, then the above calculations of flow rate need to be tripled.

Evidence for fake video: The diver in the presented video shows no sign of being moved by the force of multiple fire hoses of water processed through the device. Although the diver appears to be producing bubbles at intervals, the volume of bubbles each time is tiny compared to a full exhale. He is noticeably buoyant (having difficulty staying submerged) at the start of the video, and becomes neutrally buoyant towards the end. The explanation for this is that he took a full breath before the start of the video, and is letting it out in short bursts, NOT breathing from the device. He becomes less buoyant as his lungs empty. The entire video is shorter than the length of an un-challenging breath hold.

Evidence for dangerous: Humans cannot detect when the gas they are breathing becomes hypoxic. (Pilots train for this in case of depressurisation, and this is why airlines advise you to put your own mask on before helping others. The urge to breathe is driven by rising CO2, not falling O2 levels.) If a diver using this device moved into an area of water depleted of oxygen, they would have no way of detecting it until they fell unconscious from hypoxia (which is not a good thing underwater). Once water had been processed through the device it would be depleted of dissolved gas so a diver would have to constantly move in search of fresh water, without any way of knowing where that might be.

So how do fish manage this trick with gills? Simple answer - they are cold blooded, require a tiny fraction of the oxygen we warm-blooded mammals require for metabolism, and can remove CO2 from their bodies also using their gills, not lung ventilation.

Final note that the Indegogo page specifically places the responsibility for due diligence on to backers; it also states that the project will recieve all funds even if it does not reach all goals. Caveat emptor.

Another couple of debunks of the concept along similar lines:
http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/01/triton-not-dive-or-dive-not-there-is-no-triton/
http://www.nigelhewitt.co.uk/diving/rant/index.html#gills

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_volume
[2] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/oxygen-solubility-water-d_841.html
[3] http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Re-St/Sea-Water-Gases-in.html

Seeing is believing AND swimming AND breathing!!!

 
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According to the campaign post I just received...


Good day everyone!
First, we want to thank everyone who has supported our campaign. It’s been an amazing journey, and we’re excited to share our latest news. Today’s update is very important, so please read this note carefully.

Over the past week, we have received several requests for more video footage and evidence that demonstrates Triton’s technology. We’ve been eager to respond, so we rented a pool to shoot a new video that shows Triton in action, which you can view here

Since launching we have been protecting our proprietary technology because it’s so important to our success, but after careful consideration we think it’s important to share these details and clarify how the device works. Inside of each Triton, the artificial gills utilize “liquid oxygen”, which combined with the other components allow users to breathe underwater, which you can see in the video above. We will release more information about the ‘liquid oxygen’ cylinders and safety strap.

Note that the “liquid oxygen” cylinders won’t last forever so we plan to make it possible for backers to purchase and exchange cylinders through our website. They will come in packs of 1, 3 and 5, and we’ll list prices as soon as they are finalized. We’re also working on a solution to make them refillable.

We wanted to share it at the beginning of the campaign but were hesitant because we also wanted to protect our intellectual property. Our success and the positive comments we have received have made it clear that these details are important for our backers to understand.

We launched this campaign to build a community of people who are excited to bring Triton to life, and we are committed to making sure our backers feel confident in our efforts. After careful consideration and in light of this new information, we have decided to refund all Triton backers and launch a brand new campaign.

It’s important to us that our backers are fully informed about our product before contributing. If you’re excited about Triton and want to be a part of our movement, you can contribute to our new campaign here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/triton-world-s-first-artificial-gills-re-breather/x/13262121#/

Our campaign will be down for about an hour while all the refunds are being processed.

Since we began this journey, you have kept us motivated every day. We are continuing to develop Triton and hope you will be a part of our success.

Thank you,
Triton
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