Oceangate Titan Submersible Manufacturing and Engineering Issues Part 1

Oceangate video on filiment winding

[Athanasia]

This is the most detailed take on carbon fiber I've seen so far! Thanks!

[Jefferson-lyqe]

Yellow is known to be a stronger colour for submarines

[wattage]

I noticed that when transporting the sub by crane, the straps were attached to the titanium end rings, so the whole 10, 000kg weight of the sub was borne by the two parts which were glued onto the carbon fibre hull. That's surely got to have taken its toll on that questionable glue joint.

[Yelladog]

Before this video I really knew absolutely nothing about carbon fiber this was very interesting and I learned a lot thank you

[LoganLeGrand]

I work with a lot of epoxy/urethane bonding to aluminum and we increase the surface area with media blasting the surface and roughing it with special cutters. I noticed the titanium end pieces had smooth machining work and the salvage photos you could see the bonding had detached cleanly from the surface for the most part.

[michaelcramerichliebemeinl]

to me, seeing that the end-domes and the titanium rings were recovered quite intact, and also noticing that the acrylic window was blown out inclusive the retaining titanium ring that held that window in its place and its bolts, that tells the story all to well. The carbon fibre part of the vessel crushed in on itself and then the air inside this compartment blew out the acrylic window from the inside out like a champagne cork. All that with such a force that it even dismounted the retaining titanium ring and the bolts holding it. What I really can`t get my head around is, that they did just parallel layers of the carbon fibre and not criss-crossed them. Most likely this wouldn`t be strong enough either, but it for sure would have increased the amount of pressure the hull would have been able to take by a lot.

[algieabrams]

Good info, Joe. DIY a mic blast screen by using a sock filled with cotton and put over the mic. The distracting pop will go away

[realonethreesevens]

Very informative video! Investing in a pop filter would highly heighten the quality of your productions

[flintread]

I noticed too, that after the wrapped the mandril with 5 inches of carbon fiber they then routed out a 1/2 inch flange for the titanium rings to sit over when glued on, The bottom flange is just visible in the photo you show of the vessel hanging upright, so imagine that at both ends, Carbon fiber at any thickness does not respond well to the stresses introduced by any bladed machining process and would have developed micro fractures. Also no one seems to be pointing this out but in the video of the wrapping process you can clearly see quite large air voids being introduced during the wrapping itself and they just carry on wrapping, That was the first alarm bell that rang loudly for me when I saw that video and if i had seen that there is no way I would want anyone trusting their life to that cylinder, Let alone the madness of actually thinking a cylinder is a good idea for a pressure vessel at those depths! So not only did they have a crappy idea for the shape of the submersibles pressure vessel it seems to have be manufactured with very little care in the first place.

[leopardwoman]

I’m retired from R&D Composite design. This was a very good video on this topic. 👍👍👍😀

[ExaltedDuck]

"The titanium flanges are bonded with a type of epoxy...we don't know what type... it's proprietary"

Yet somehow none of us would be shocked if there were a couple dozen of those side-by-side syringes from home depot sitting empty in the dumpsters out behind the shop where this thing was made...

[edwamser]

Just to clarify, Spencer Composites(not located in the Pacific Northwest, btw) only created the prototype tube not the one that imploded. The image at 12:05 is not the Spencer Composites facility.

[peterwikvist]

Thank you Joe for sharing this insight into carbon fibre product manufacturing.

[uzzuzz]

During Med school my professor would always say never trust your life on a piece of equipment. So far that's worked for me.

[sailcat]

Thank you, Joe. Great to get an engineering perspective on this totally preventable tragedy. One request and this is kind of minor but as a headphone user I'd recommend a pop filter on your microphone, please. All the best.

[forrestgumpv]

That is the best video explaining carbon fiber description and application. Thank You Joe. 👍

[mygundidntdoit]

Colonel Phillip Corso said carbon fiber was back engineered from crashed alien spacecraft. His job was to seed different materials from the crashed saucers into industry to let them figure out how to back engineer them, because the military was not having any luck. For the things that were used by the military, the companies had an agreement to only make it exclusively for the military. When Corso said this, it reminded me of witnesses to the Roswell crash who said there were beams in the structure of the crashed craft that were real lightweight, but stronger than steel. It was probably carbon fiber or carbon nano tubes, which I read is 20 times stronger than carbon fiber. Anyway, thanks for the great video. I learned alot about carbon fiber from watching it.

[tomray]

Carbon fiber has a good tinsele strength, but it's not very good for compression or shear strength, if you want a scuba tank where you're holding pressure within a multi directional weave would be great. But horrible at trying to keep pressure out.

[JasonC-rply]

very interesting! Nice to hear some thoughts on the engineering .

[methylene]

Just a quick question about the difference in hull strength if the CF was used differently.
Instead of axially wrapping the CF around the inner titanium tube the way OceanGate made the Titan hull, what if instead the CF was 5" (or whatever hull thickness) wide factory finely woven into a curve that exactly matched the curvature of the inner titanium tube, in one single piece thousands of metres long?
So in other words, wrapping adjacent to the flanges and gradually building up to the full length of the hull, with the woven CF perpendicular to the inner titanium tube external surface. I imagine quite expensive, far more difficult, would need to be compressed as it was wrapped, and may require some new tech to achieve, but in theory this way the CF wouldn't be as likely to delaminate since the pressure from the titanium bulkheads would press the spiral laminate tightly together. Obviously the design would need to allow for some longitudinal compression and expansion (possibly with bellows to allow for this on the inner titanium hull), but at least with the radially woven CF, then in theory there would be much greater compressional strength that would take greater advantage of the tensile strength of CF. I'd have thought it would be more ideal to design the CF hull so it could be easily removed (for reduced maintenance costs) in one cylindrical piece from the titanium hull, for testing/scanning from both the exterior and interior surface for better resolution. Obviously the above would require a lot of work and engineering, far easier said than done.
If the Titan could even survive one trip to the Titanic with that crude axially wrapped wrapped CF hull (which I find quite surprising) then I'd have thought a far better way of using CF more suited for compressional loading might hold some promise, at least for the testing phase and unmanned trials.
What are your thoughts?