Work of breathing Work of breathing Work of breathing (WOB) is the energy expended to inhale and exhale a breathing gas. It is usually expressed as work per unit volume, for example, joules/litre, or as a work rate (power), such as joules/min or equivalent units, as it is not particularly useful without a reference to volume or time. It can be calculated in terms of the pulmonary pressure multiplied by the change in pulmonary volume, or in terms of the oxygen consumption attributable to breathing. In a normal resting state the work of breathing constitutes about 5% of the total body oxygen consumption.
Milli mass unit Milli mass unit The milli mass unit or (mmu) is used as a unit of mass by some scientific authors even though this unit is not defined by the IUPAP red book nor by the IUPAC green book. It is a short form of the tongue-breaking but formally more correct "milli unified atomic mass unit" (mu) and equivalent to 1/1000 of the unified atomic mass unit (u). A more modern name is the millidalton (mDa) since the "unified atomic mass unit" is more and more displaced by the unit dalton. (1 Da = 1 u) Since 1961 the unified atomic