Development of a High Mobility, Contaminated Water Dive Suit System

This is our SBIR Phase II proposal for the development of working prototypes of a free swimming dive suit system for use in contaminated water by NSW divers. Existing commercial equipment available for contaminated water diving provides a high level of protection but does not allow"free swimming"use, and are not adaptable to this application. Currently for contaminated water use NSW divers employ conventional FFMs (full face masks) and dry suits that are not optimized for this use and have significant performance and safety shortcomings. Our Phase I effort identified the FFM as the critical weakness of these systems and we have developed a new mask system concept, which when combined with an optimized dry suit, will provide greatly improved performance. Our mask system will provide a helmet like seal to protect the divers face from contaminated water, and incorporates a unique face seal system that will allow conformance with a wide range of face shapes, while providing a high level of comfort. The objectives of our Phase II effort are to develop working prototypes of our design concepts and deliver 5 functional systems to the Navy for test and evaluation. We believe this system, as is or with minor modifications, would have a wide market in other military, SAR and commercial diving applications.