Diving Diseases Research Centre (DDRC)

HyperBaric Oxygen Therapy (HBO)

Our Hyperbaric Medical Centres are purpose built facilities designed for effective and sympathetic application of HBO therapy for patients; our Plymouth facility has four hyperbaric chambers and our Welsh facility has one Monoplace chamber. Hyperbaric means pressure above normal atmospheric pressure; in the case of HBO this is achieved by placing the patient inside a chamber that is then pressurised in line with specified guidance, the patient is then given pure oxygen to breathe. The result of breathing oxygen in this manner (while under pressure) will, in certain circumstances multiply the benefit.

Chambers

1. One “Krug” Chamber
   
• Steel construction
  
• Internal Diameter 2400mm
• 12 man Multiplace chamber
  
• Manufactured by “Ardeth” Engineering in England
  
• Maximum Working Pressure (MWP) of 6 bar absolute, this is the equivalent of diving to 50 metres in the sea
2. Two “Comex” Chambers
   
• Steel construction
  
• Internal Diameter 1800mm
  
• 4 man Multiplace chambers Manufactured by “Con. Metaliques” in France
  
• MWP pressure 21 bar (200m of sea water)
3. Two “HYOX” Monoplace chambers
   
• Acrylic Tube construction
  
• Internal Diameter 700mm
  
• One man Monoplace chambers Manufactured by “Divex” in Scotland
  
• MWP 2.8 bar absolute (18m of sea water)

Support Equipment

These chambers require a good deal of support equipment:

• Liquid oxygen (LOX) plants one in Plymouth and one in Newport, South Wales. When a large quantity of oxygen is required it makes sense to store it in its liquid form “LOX”. One litre of LOX will produce approximately 800 litres of gaseous oxygen.
• Oil free low pressure (LP) compressors manufactured by “Compair”; these compressors can produce large quantities of air in a relatively short period of time. As the majority of our chambers are pressurised using air these are fundamental to our unit and running oil free compressors means that there is no possibility of unwanted oil products being introduced to the chambers while under pressurisation.
• Oil free High Pressure (HP) compressors manufactured by “RIX Industries” in the USA; we use High Pressure air as our emergency back up supply for our chambers and these compressors are needed in order to keep the backup air bank topped up to an acceptable level. Again these run oil free as above.
  
• Air storage; our chambers are very large and therefore require a lot of air in a short space of time, air stored in large vessels is used to ensure that we have enough air on tap at all times.
• Gas transfer pump when carrying out our research we can be asked to produce a specific gas mixture, this will involve mixing two or more gases together, our gas transfer pump allows us to pump high pressure gases safely. This is achieved by a “Haskel” gas transfer pump.

Research

DDRC has six small pressure vessels for use with various research projects such as equipment testing and microbiological research (Note: DDRC does not conduct research on animals).