Diving chamber

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Diving chamber

The decompression chamber at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab
Acronym	DDC
Other names	Decompression chamber Deck decompression chamber Recompression chamber Hyperbaric chamber Saturation chamber
Uses	Diver training Therapeutic recompression Surface decompression Saturation diving Diving physiology research

A diving chamber is a vessel for human occupation, which may have an entrance that can be sealed to hold an internal pressure significantly higher than ambient pressure, a pressurised gas system to control the internal pressure, and a supply of breathing gas for the occupants.

There are two main functions for diving chambers:

• as a simple form of submersible vessel to transport divers underwater and to provide a temporary base and retrieval system in the depths;
• as a land, ship or offshore platform-based hyperbaric chamber or system, to artificially reproduce the hyperbaric conditions under the sea. Internal pressures above normal atmospheric pressure are provided for diving-related applications such as saturation diving and diver decompression, and non-diving medical applications such as hyperbaric medicine. Also known as a Pressure vessel for human occupancy, or PVHO. The engineering safety design code is ASME PVHO-1.^[1]