Carbon Fiber Submarine Implosion: How Many Dives Can It Withstand? [video]

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4 points·mechhacker··3 comments

This is a video by the hydraulic press channel which uses a scaled, very similar geometry to the Titan submarine which unfortunately failed recently.

They explain some of the details here, and show high speed footage of what happens when the tube fails.

Their demo seems to implode a little premature. Perhaps it is not a scaled replication of the incident vessel?

I think it could be interesting to see the same tests done using a titanium tube with the same grade/composition used by all the other deep sea vessels and find how many bars are required to cause a failure.

Yes I don't think it gets to the same depth. They used an off the shelf tube (presumably then getting consistent layup/quality), which gave it a definite thickness and diameter.

There are nondimensional structural similarity parameters that could be used as well, which I don't think they did, but those are used for subscale structural modeling for things like buckling. Sometimes substitute materials are used as well to get the right structural parameter.

Kind of like Reynold's number for fluid flow but for structures. It's been a while since I studied that aspect and can't remember off the top of my head.

I'd like to see the Ti failure too. He did cast a Ti sub replica a few months back and it flattened to a banana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tW4zfTeJqM

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