OceanGate Titan Implosion: LS-DYNA Simulations

By now, everyone has already heard about the tragic incident of OceanGate Titan implosion. I was asked by many of my connections to do numerical simulations of this catastrophic event. But never got the time to sit on it until yesterday.

Due to the incomplete details at hand, here is a simplified model. The materials are assumed to be IM600/133 CFRP for the main vessel body and Ti 5AI 2Sn 2Zr 4Mo 4Cr Alloy for the domes. The acrylic window was not considered in the model. Perfect bonding between the dome and vessel was assumed (this is a very BIG assumption!). External pressure was applied gradually in 10 seconds duration.

Investigating more in the results (first clip), the peak surface pressure in the structure occurs at the dome connections with the vessel (as mentioned above, the perfect bonding is a BIG assumption), whereas the minimum pressure occurs on the vessel body. This is due to the difference in the properties of the CFRP and Titanium allow.

In the second clip, we can see that the fibers of the CFRP fails first due to its compressive limit, followed by matrix failure in both compressive and tensile model. Lastly, the fiber tensile limit is reached.

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Implosion of Composite Vessels will be one of the examples discussed in my upcoming short workshop in August. More details will be shared later. Comment down if you are interested to join and I will keep you posted with the updates.

#oceangate #titan #implosion #composite #lsdyna #fea #cae #submarine #marinestructures

[Thierry]

Super interesting and far more likely than the people claiming that it imploded slowly over a period of half an hour. I tried recreating the same setup in Radioss but could not figure out proper boundary conditions. Could you explain how you constrained the model?

[UnpopularMechanics]

Hey man very cool! So what you are showing here is basically just the implosion itself due to the rapid change in pressure right? It would be really interesting further study this and simulate the vessel at steady pressure and simulate a "crack" via element deletion or something. Maybe look at how different locations of the crack would change the implosion behavior? Just a thought!

[smong-space]

Hi thanks for your video.
I have a question. How did you set hydrostatic pressure?
Did you use LOAD_SEGMENT?

[defendermodsandtravels]

What's the compressive failure stress of the CF composite?

[Thingwithlegs]

Are you gonna make a new one? Pleaaase

[nobinmehrub]

My machine design course requires to make a FEA simulation. Could walk me through the process on how to do this? Thank you in advance
I was doing in reference to the boreii class submarine

[ThamannaIqbal]

Can you please tell me how to import ANSYS mechanical APDL file to ls dyna and what are the other procedures?
Also i am not able to obtain the results and plots in ls dyna but don’t know what the error is. Can you please help me with that?

[greglocock]

So what wall thickness did you actually use? 127mm or 12.7mm as the video shows?

[nicolafoudre]

Why do the end caps fail, they recovered them, (i'm not sure about both) but I'm pretty sure they recovered them. I think its the model you choose. Really good simulation tho!