Physics Applied to Diving 6.- Henry's law
Henry's law shows the
relationship between the pressure of a gas and the amount of substance inside a
body. In SCUBA diving this law gives reason to the increase in nitrogen gas
inside the body which could produce a Decompression Sickness.
This law enunciates that: The
quantity of gas dissolved in a liquid is directly proportional to the partial
pressure of the gas it's in contact with. [1]
The mathematical way to show
this law is:
C=P*k
Where C is the concentration of
the gas inside a body, P is the partial pressure of the gas and k is a constant
value. This law tells us that a when a body is in contact with a gaseous system
at equilibrium it has an amount of gas dissolved inside it proportional to the
pressure of the gas. The constant "k" in the equation depends on
several variables like the temperature, the liquid molecules, etc. In the table
shown next we can see how the nitrogen concentration changes in human blood
depending of the pressure of common air.
Table extracted from [2]
[1] M. B. King, Phase
Equilibrium in Mixtures, Pergamon Press, 1969, page 203
[2] Tosun Ismail, The
Thermodynamics of Phase and Reaction Equilibria, Elsevier, 2013, page 470
April 11, 2020
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