Alan (Alon) Bodner, M.S.

The NewScientist article Breathing in oceans full of air said

“I FELT fine until I passed out,” says Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Back in 1980 he had built an artificial gill that extracted oxygen from water. His dream was that the device would one day allow him to breathe just like a fish, giving him an unlimited supply of oxygen while diving.
 
Enter Israeli inventor Alon Bodner, who unveiled a novel approach last year. Instead of a membrane gill, he plans to use an industrial process for separating gases from a liquid, based on the principle that if you lower the pressure of a liquid, for example with a centrifugal pump, the gas dissolved in it bubbles out. Bodner claims his battery-powered device will be able to extract virtually all the air dissolved in water. With seawater, this would typically yield a gas containing 34 per cent oxygen. Crucially, because Bodner’s device extracts nitrogen as well as oxygen from the water, nitrogen loss is not an issue.
 
The vast majority of the compressed air carried by scuba divers is wasted, bubbling back to the surface with most of the oxygen unused. In rebreathers (and in membrane gills) the air is recycled, with the lost oxygen replenished and CO₂ removed. Rebreathers give divers hours of bottom time with just a small oxygen tank. So Bodner plans to make his system part of a rebreather, which means it would only need to extract all the air from 200 litres of water a minute. Because the system would add oxygen-rich air to the breathing air rather than pure oxygen, nitrogen would have to be vented periodically to prevent its build-up, but this is already done in existing semi-closed-circuit rebreathers.

Alan (Alon) Bodner, M.S. is the founder of Like-A-Fish Technologies, a company that pioneered the break through technology that extracts dissolved oxygen from ocean water and enables humans to breathe underwater. He holds several patents both on the systems and the applications. This first-of-a-kind technology may soon pave the way for humans living underwater and extended submerged time for conventional (non-nuclear) submarines.
 
He has appeared on television science shows across the world, and thousands of articles were written about him in magazines and in the internet. In addition, several books were written on the technology and he was featured in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry as one of the “Modern-Day Leonardos”.
 
Alan’s background is a myriad of engineering fields, including: Mechanical Engineering, FEM, Ship Engineering, Risk Analysis, Robotics, development of numerous Computer-Machine interfacing (hardware and software), artificial vision, computer imaging analysis, electronic design, CAD/CAM, Fluid Dynamics, Noise Analysis (airports, vehicles, and tires), tire footprint pressure analysis and more.
 
His patents include Open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus and Method and System for Separation of Gas from Liquid.
 
Alan earned his B.S. degree in 1978 and his M.S. degree in 1986, both from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
 
Watch him on The Discovery Channel – Daily Planet.