is it bad to breath the compressed air when scuba diving?
im saying is that compressed air in the tank unhealthy compaired to normal air on the surface? what is the compressed air composed of?
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nah its is fine. the compressed air is just normal compressed and when you breath it through your regulator it is normal air like that at the surface.
idk
No, as long as the tank was filled by a machine made to fill scuba tanks then it will be safe. It is normal air that has the moisture removed from it so it is very dry air. You don’t want moisture in the air because at high pressure it condenses out into water and you don’t want that in your lungs, of course. Your body is compressed under water just like the air is so the air doesn’t push out any more than at the surface. The longer and deeper you are under water the more Nitrogen that is dissolved in your blood since air is 80% Nitrogen, so as you come up you need to do it slowly and pause at certain depths to exhale the Nitrogen from your body so you don’t get “the bends” which is a medical emergency.
Compressed air is….air. Same stuff you are breathing right now. Apart from being compressed (most commonly about 205 times the pressure at sea level), it is filtered and extremely dry. The dryness has nothing to do with moisture getting into your lungs, the moisture is removed to prevent the interior of the scuba tank from becoming corroded and weakened (especially critical for steel tanks).
As long as the tank is in good condition and has been filled recently from a reputable dive shop, there should be nothing unhealthy about scuba air. Being highly filtered, it is very clean. The worst thing about it is that it is so dry your body humidifies it as you breathe it and you exhale moisture with each breath, which can lead to dehydration. Also, as the air expands from tank pressure to ambient pressure it cools so you also warm the air on each breath and thus lose a small amount of body heat every time you exhale.
Breathing compressed air CAN be unhealthy if the air is contaminated, for example by carbon monoxide, or if moisture gets inside a steel tank and it starts to rust. Compressed air can become contaminated if the compressor or filtration system is poorly maintained and incompletely combusted hydrocarbons (such as engine exhaust) gets into the system. A rusting tank interior may, over a period of months, consume enough oxygen from the air that it doesn’t contain enough oxygen to sustain conciousness. These events can and do occur, but are rare. Most often, compressed air is not signficantly different from what you breathe on the surface.
This answer ignores the effect of breathing that air at pressures higher than surface pressure, which is another topic entirely. As has been already noted by someone else, the fact that additional nitrogen dissolves into body tissues when pressure is increased can cause problems when we return to surface pressures and the nitrogen comes back out of solution. This is not caused by any inherent unhealthiness in the air being breathed, it is simply a product of the physics and physiology of breathing any inert gas under pressure and then relatively rapidly reducing the surrounding pressure.