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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2008) |
A buoyancy compensator (or buoyancy control device, BC or BCD) is a piece of diving equipment worn by divers to provide:
Some types of buoyancy compensator also built around the diver's scuba set or are built into its harness.
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BCs can have the following features:
There are three main types of BC:
Wings consist of a pair of inflatable bladders worn behind and on either side of the diver. Wings are not a recent development, but have recently become popular again because of technical diving where they are often used, as the technical diver often carries multiple cylinders, and frequently in overhead environments. The bladders and cylinders are fastened to a backplate which is strapped to the diver. The wing design allows for a large bladder to be used if needed, so this design can offer a very large total lift capacity: 30 litre wings are not uncommon. Elasticated webbing around each bladder is used by some to allow them to expand but to draw them back to the backplate when not inflated, although there is some dispute as to the wisdom of this addition2. Heavy equipment such as diving cylinders can be fixed to or slung from the back plate.
Stab jacket, stabiliser jacket, stab, waistcoat, or vest BCs are inflatable vests worn by the diver around the upper torso, and also act as the cylinder harness. The air bladder may extend from the back around the diver's sides ("wraparound") or may only cover the back ("back inflation.") Wraparound bladders are favored by some divers because they may make it easier to maintain balance, both submerged and on the surface. However, some designs have had the tendency to squeeze the diver's torso when inflated. Back inflation (Wing) BC's do not have this problem but have a greater tendency to float the diver face-down on the surface, which presents an obvious hazard in an emergency. Jacket-style BC's typically provide up to 25 litres of buoyancy (depending on size) and are fairly comfortable to wear. Jacket-style BC's are the most common type among recreational divers because they can integrate buoyancy control, weights, attachment points for auxiliary gear, and cylinder retention in a single piece of gear. The diver need only attach a cylinder and regulator set in order to have a complete SCUBA set. Some "tech-rec" jacket-style BC's have the ability to carry multiple cylinders.
Adjustable Buoyancy Life Jackets, ABLJs, or Horsecollar BCs are worn around the neck and chest with straps around the waist and usually between the legs. They are historically derived from Mae West lifejackets which were cheap and available. As they were developed in the 1960s 3 they have been largely superseded by wing and vest type BCs. Additionally, they are relatively less comfortable because they use a crotch strap between the legs, and generally provide less total buoyancy potential (up to 15 liters) than Jacket BC or Wings, even though this amount is still generally adequate for both warm water and cold water recreational diving. Finally, because the diver must use a separate cylinder harness as a platform for the aqualung, they are slightly more complicated to use. However, its location on the diver's chest means that it does the best job of all BCs in floating a distressed, fatigued and/or unconscious diver face-up on the surface in the event of a problem.
When underwater, a diver often needs to be neutrally buoyant so that the diver neither sinks nor rises but remains at constant depth, with minimal effort. A state of neutral buoyancy exists when the weight of water that the diver displaces equals the total weight of the diver. The diver uses the BC to maintain this neutral buoyancy by adjusting the BC's volume and therefore its buoyancy, in response to various effects, which alter the diver’s overall volume or weight, primarily:
In practice, the diver doesn't think about all this theory during the dive. To remain neutrally buoyant, gas is injected into the BC when the diver is too heavy, or is sinking, and vented from the BC when the diver is too buoyant, or is rising. A feature of diving is that there isn't any automatically stable equilibrium position for a diver wearing a BC, or even simply for a diver with lungs full of air. Any change in depth from a position of neutrality and even a small changes in volume, including the simple act of breathing, result in a force toward an even less neutral depth. Thus, maintenance of neutral buoyancy in scuba must be a continuous and active procedure; its is the diving equivalent of balance. Fortunately, the diver's mass provides a source of inertia, as does the liquid medium, so small perturbations (such as from breathing) can be compensated for with relative ease by an experienced diver.
A feature of scuba which is often non-intuitive to beginning students of diving, is that gas generally needs to be added to the BC when a diver descends in a controlled manner, and valved-off (removed or vented) from the BC when the diver ascends in a controlled manner. This gas maintains the volume of the gas bubble in the BC during depth changes; this bubble needs to remain at constant volume for the diver to remain even approximately neutrally buoyant. When gas is not added to the BC during a descent, the gas bubble in the BC decreases in volume due to the increasing pressure, resulting in faster and faster descent with depth, until the diver hits the bottom. The same runaway phenomenon, an example of positive feedback, can happen during ascent, resulting in uncontrolled ascent, until a diver prematurely surfaces without a safety stop.
With experience, divers eventually learn to minimize this problem by minimizing the size of the "constant volume bubble" in their BC's. This requires learning the minimum weighting requirement needed for their system, at the beginning of the dive (see factors above). Somewhat complex automatic reflexes behaviors are also developed by experienced divers, involving breathing control and BC gas management during depth changes, which allow them to remain neutrally buoyant without having to think much about it. Experienced scuba divers may often be identified by the fact that they maintain neutrality without any fin use, as fish do.
The orientation of the submerged diver is influenced by the BC and by other buoyancy and weight components and contributed to by the diver's body, clothing and equipment. The diver typically wishes to be positioned face-down while under water, to be able to see and swim usefully, but face-up, to be able to breathe, when on the surface.
The orientation of a static and stable object in water, such as a diver, is determined by its centre of buoyancy and its centre of mass. At equilibrium, they will be lined up under gravity with the centre of buoyancy vertically with (preferably above) the centre of mass. The diver's overall buoyancy and centre of buoyancy can routinely be adjusted by altering the volume of the gas in the BC, lungs and diving suit. The diver's mass on a typical dive does not generally change by what seems like much (see above-- a typical dive-resort "aluminum 80" tank at 200 bar contains about 2.8 kg (~6lbs) of air or nitrox, of which about 2.3 kg (~5lbs) is typically used in a dive), although a large change is possible if the weight belt is jettisoned or a heavy object is picked up; and any air spaces such as in the BC and in diving suits will expand and shrink with depth pressure.
Generally, the diver has minimal control of the position of the buoyancy in the BC, only its quantity, although the diver does control his equipment setup, which includes its configuration and weighting locations, which ultimately influences where his effective BC lift is relative to his Center of Gravity.4.
Traditionally, weight belts or weight systems are worn with the weights on or close to the waist and are arranged with a quick release mechanism to allow them to be quickly jettisoned to provide extra buoyancy in an emergency. Current systems integrate the weights into the BCD providing some comfort and safety advantages as long as the BCD does not have to be removed from the body of the diver, for example in an emergency situation.
By inflating the BC at the surface the conscious diver may be able to easily float face-up, depending on his equipment configuration choices. A fatigued or unconscious diver can be made to float face up on the surface by adjustment of their buoyancy and weights so the buoyancy raises the top and front of the diver's body and the weights act on the lower and back of the body. An inflated ABLJ always provides this orientation, but an inflated stab, and all styles of wing BC generally float the diver facedown because the centre of buoyancy is too far from the diver's front. This floating orientation is generally considered undesirable and can be minimized pre-dive by: relocation of weights (perhaps of quick release type) further to the rear (such as or close to the diver's cylinder); avoiding the use of Aluminum tanks and using higher density cylinders (typically steel), which similarly moves the centre of mass to be further behind the diver, and thus, behind the center of buoyancy. The BC type can also be selected with this factor in mind, selecting a style that moves the centre of buoyancy forward, as this accomplishes the same net effect. Any or all of these options can be utilized to trim the system out to its desired characteristics5 and many factors can contribute, such as the number and position of diving cylinders, the type of diving suit, the position and size of stage cylinders, the size and shape of the diver's body and the wearing of ankle weights, or additional dive equipment, which each influence a diver's orientation in the water (horizontal) and on the surface (vertical) to some degree.
The ABLJ was developed by Maurice Fenzy in 1961. 6 Early versions were inflated by mouth underwater. Later versions had their own air inflation cylinder. Some had carbon dioxide inflation cylinders, a development which was abandoned when valves that allowed divers to breathe from the BC's inflation bag were introduced. Since 1969 most modern BCs have used inflation gas from one of the diver's main gas cylinders, in addition to an oral inflation tube which is used at the surface in the event the diver has no high pressure gas left. In 1971, ScubaPro developed the Stabilizer Jacket, the first jacket-style BC, and in 1972 Watergill developed the Atpac wing.
More recent innovations for jacket BCs include, weight pouches to adjust attitude underwater, putting the weights on the BC rather than on a weightbelt, integrated regulators, heavily reinforced 1050 denier ballistic nylon. Innovations for backplate and wing include redundant bladders, stainless steel backplates, lightweight soft nylon backplates, and 85lb lift bladders.
Dive Rite pioneered the first wing for diving twin cylinders in 1985. Competitors in tech diving include Ocean Management Systems. Other SCUBA manufacturers include Sherwood, Zeagle, scubapro and cressisub.
There are other types of equipment worn by divers that affect buoyancy:
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