Gas Exclusion as Runtime Assurance in Water-Filled Cellular Infrastructure: The AME Air-Entry and Gas Management Canonical

The Adaptive Matrix Ecosystem (AME) programme rests on a foundational engineering axiom that has so far been defended implicitly across the Hexalogy and the AMW feasibility stack: no air and no vacuum anywhere in the host IPS volume. The no-air-no-vacuum axiom underwrites IPS-C passive arrest, the depth-independence of AMW transit, the confinement mechanics of Paper 4A, and the design parameter map of IPS-D. A bubble of compressible gas lodged anywhere in the network breaks every one of these guarantees by a route none of those papers explicitly handle. This paper closes that foundational gap. We show that gas exclusion at AME operating pressures (gauge ΔP ≤ 15 kPa) is a problem with mature engineering precedent across hydraulic-fluid power, water-supply pipeline practice, biomedical perfusion circuits, and water-filled structural concepts, and we synthesise that literature into the first integrated framework specific to NRL-walled AME cellular volumes. The framework comprises: (i) manufacture-stage degassing and seal-at-pressure protocols that establish the initial gas inventory; (ii) a Henry's-law treatment of dissolved-gas equilibria adapted to the diurnal-temperature-cycling regime of real AME deployments; (iii) a quantitative bounded-deviation tolerance envelope that defines exactly which gas-entry events are runtime-tolerable and which are not; (iv) a detect–vent–isolate protocol that maps each non-tolerable event to a specific DFOS detection signature and an AMW-dispatchable response; and (v) a bench-loop test rig (Bench Loop F: Gas-Tightness Cell) that falsifies the framework's central claims. We close with the canonical citation sentence by which the six AMW feasibility-stack papers (II.1–II.6) invoke this canonical's bounded-deviation envelope, and the triad-gate compliance verification.