| Richness of Nitrox mix |
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Nitrox with more than 40% oxygen is uncommon within recreational diving. There are two main reasons for this: the first is that all pieces of diving equipment that come into contact with mixes containing higher proportions of oxygen, particularly at high pressure, need special cleaning and servicing to reduce the risk of fire.
The two most common recreational diving nitrox mixes are 32% and 36%, which have maximum operating depths of about 34 metres / 110 feet and 29 metres / 95 feet respectively when limited to a maximum partial pressure of oxygen of 1.4 bar. EAN32 is common because it is the mixture with the maximum concentration of oxygen that allows the diver to go to the full depth of recreational diving's "No Decompression Limit" for air. The second reason is that richer mixes extend the time the diver can stay underwater without needing decompression stops far further than the duration of typical diving cylinders. For example, based on the PADI nitrox recommendations, the maximum operating depth for Nitrox45 would be 21 meters / 70 feet and the maximum dive time available at this depth even with Nitrox36 is nearly 1 hour 15 minutes: a diver with a breathing rate of 20 litres per minute using twin 10 litre, 230 bar (about double 85 cu. ft.) cylinders would have completely emptied the cylinders after 1 hour 14 minutes at this depth. Nitrox, usually containing 50% to 80% oxygen, as well as pure oxygen, is common in technical diving as a decompression gas, which eliminates inert gases, such as nitrogen and helium, from the tissues more quickly than leaner oxygen mixtures eliminate them. In deep open circuit technical diving, where hypoxic gases are breathed during the bottom portion of the dive, a Nitrox mix with 50% or less oxygen called a "travel mix" is sometimes breathed during the beginning of the descent in order to avoid hypoxia. Normally, however, the most oxygen-lean of the diver's decompression gases would be used for this purpose, since descent time spent reaching a depth where bottom mix is no longer hypoxic is normally small, and the distance between this depth and the MOD of any nitrox decompression gas is likely to be very short, if it occurs at all. |
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