Krista Kemper, Bart Kemper, and Alexis San Miguel all made the trek to northern Scotland to attend the ASME Codes and Standards committee meeting for Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy, March 3-6, 2025. The meeting was hosted by JFD at the National Hyperbaric Centre in Aberdeen. This facility helps protect divers in the North Sea by being able to receive hyperbaric lifeboats with divers still under pressure and transfer them into the land-based system for evaluation and treatment. They also provide medical hyperbaric treatment under the care of specially trained doctors, nurses, and technicians.
In addition to typical committee business, the ASME members and friends were hosted by Submarine Manufacturing and Products, Limited (SMP Ltd) to a first-class Scotch tasting, led by SMP’s Adam Young, at the Aberdeen Maritime Museum. After the week’s formal activites, the group also visited Castle Fraser and the Glen Garioch Distillery.
A notable event during the ASME PVHO meeting was Krista Kemper was nominated to chair the defunct Subcommittee for Quality Control (Section 3). The subcommitttee had become dormant decades ago when the rules for window design and manufacturing stabilized. In 2018, ASME PVHO-1 formally changed its scope to become a systems document in order to better address safety and the process of integrating life support into an ASME pressure vessel to create a PVHO. This change is not reflected in the current text. In addition, there are new issues regarding flexible chambers, tunnel boring machines, and the use of software to control gas mix and pressures as well as other operational issues. Before moving into engineering, Krista had worked in quality control in software as well as performed similar functions with ammunition and ammunition controls in the US Army. She is intimately familiar with the quality control required for documents and document controls for PVHOs. Krista has been charged with recruiting volunteers for her subcommittee to assess what changes are needed to update Section 3 to a systems document and what changes, if any, are needed to address the current challenges relating to commercial diving, medical hyperbaric/hypobaric chambers, submarines, tunnel boring machines, and related issues for humans under pressurized conditions.
A group shot of the ASME PVHO committee and the JFD staff at the March 2025 codes and standards meeting. JFD was an amazing host and made sure everyone felt welcome. In the background is the upper deck of the National Hyperbaric Centre.
The upper right image is the scale model for the National Hyberbaric Centre’s reception system for hyperbaric lifeboats. The massive upper deck, where the group shot was taken, is just the upper portion of the remarkable system. The bottom left image is Krista looking at possibly the smallest diving bell in existance, large enough for just one diver in a “bounce dive” in an open-bottom shell. The SMP-hosted scotch tasting at the Aberdeen Maritime Museum was appreciated by all.
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