this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Exactly this. The reality is his submersible was dangerously unsafe, it’s a bit of a misconception that it was a ticking time bomb because of fatigue- that is a thing related to metallic (crystalline )structures and stress cycles-as a composite, CF doesn’t have that.
What Cameron was getting at is that with titanium and steel, it’s can be modeled very easily- and because steel has a relatively high tolerance before fatiguenstarts… they literally can engineer around it and make parts that effectively don’t have fatigue (unlike aluminum, where every elastic bend degrades it’s structure.)
The problem with composites is that they are very difficult to model. You degrade the polymer (that is epoxy) and it weakens the hull. You drop the sub on the deck, get a delaminated bit. Whatever, once there’s damage to the structure it’s done for.
CF bikes for example, used in professional bike racing are retired after a crash because there’s no way to examine delaminating off the edge, which makes them extremely dangerous to ride,
The kind of people unwilling to have 3rd party certification to do much as validate your pressure hill is thick enough is unlikely to scrap an entire custom pressure hill because some idiot screwed the monitor into it. (Or dropped it. Or noticed that there was some delam around the hatch or whatever else.)
Yes I saw in another video that monitor stands were attached to the wall somehow. Screws straight into the carbon fiber doesn't sound ideal, although I think they had some sort of internal cage structure, so it probably wasn't that bad.
screwing into cf might be fine if youre putting wider fenders on your car or whatever, but that sounds scary af if youre in a submersible.
If I were building a submersible, I’d have an internal fairing to allow mounting things like that, yes.
But then I’d also have included seats, and used viewport domes rated for the pressure depth…. And have someone not me give the sub a certification- because I recognize that I’m human and sometimes make mistakes.
It looked like a second layer, something with a bunch of tiny holes in it.