Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Can the $30 game handle operate the submersible? A series of huge design flaws have doomed the wreckage of the Titanic to be a life gamble for five wealthy people.

Missing for 4 days, the deep-sea Titan submersible imploded disastrously.

All five crew members were killed!

Unlike an explosion, an implosion is an object that collapses rapidly inward. Netizens simulated the implosion moment of the original submersible with AI.

According to expert estimates, the Titan submarine may have collapsed at a speed of 1500km/h, that is, it was squashed within 0.001s.

You know, it takes 0.25s for the brain to respond to pain.

In other words, there is not much pain in their death, and people are gone before the brain reacts to it.

James Cameron, the director of Titanic, released a sci-fi film Abyss in 1989, which also features the famous implosion of a deep-sea submersible.

It can be seen that the submersible can not withstand the great pressure in the deep sea, the shell is damaged and implodes directly.

The CEO Stockton Rush, from the Ocean Gate submersible, was confident in previous interviews:

After the test, I firmly believed that the submarine was unassailable.

The reporter joked that Captain Edward John Smith said the same thing during the maiden voyage of the Titanic.

Stockton Rush smiled and said, Yes.

All five people were killed, and the cause and effect of the fatal design defect had to start with the diving of the Titan on the 18th day (local time).

250000 US dollars (nearly 1.8 million yuan) a ticket for a five-person trip of the rich to visit the wreckage of the Titanic at 4000 meters under the sea.

They dived on the Titan about 1450 kilometers east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

When the submersible set off for 1 hour and 45 minutes, it suddenly lost contact. According to the original plan, it reached the bottom of the sea in two hours.

Subsequently, the United States, Canada and other countries launched large-scale search and rescue operations in the North Atlantic and launched underwater sonar search.

However, this small submarine can only provide 96 hours of oxygen protection.

For a while, everyone was worried about whether they would suffocate because of the lack of oxygen in the warehouse.

Until the 22nd, US Coast Guard officials said they had found five broken parts of the submersible not far from the wreckage of the Titanic.

The debris coincides with signs of a catastrophic implosion of the submersible. So far, it is difficult to determine the time of the accident.

Unfortunately, all five people were killed, including a 19-year-old man.

They are CEO, the Ocean Gate, Hamish Harding, a British businessman and explorer, Shahzada Dawood, a wealthy British businessman and his 19-year-old son, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, an expert on the French Titanic.

The main cause of the fatal accident was a huge flaw in the design of the Titan.

Design details "Titan" uses a lot of new technologies, some of which do not have ready-made industry standards, belong to the blank field.

The hull material of the submersible Titan may have laid the groundwork for the accident.

When a reporter from the Washington Post took a submersible ride, CEO of Ocean Gate talked about the Titan's use of "discounted" materials.

CEO Rush talked publicly about how he "broke some rules" in making submersibles.

You know, if you want to enter a deep-sea submersible, you must be able to withstand ultra-high pressure. Generally speaking, the use of steel and titanium materials, relatively strong ability to withstand pressure.

Most importantly, it has also been verified by multiple experiments.

However, Titan uses carbon fiber, a relatively new material for deep-sea applications.

Carbon fiber composites are stronger and lighter than steel, making submersibles naturally buoyant, but they are also more likely to collapse suddenly under pressure.

Spencer Composites, which made hulls for Titan, was the only company at the time to make carbon fiber hulls for manned submersibles.

And Haimen seems to know clearly that this material and unreliable cabins have the potential for insufficient strength.

So the company has developed an "acoustic monitoring system".

The system can use acoustic sensors to detect the deterioration of carbon fiber in the hull.

So as to provide drivers with early warning detection, so that they have enough time to stop the descent and safely return to the surface.

To sum up, their attitudes towards security risks are:

There is no fear of hidden dangers in the design. If a safety problem is detected in the deep sea of 4000 meters, we will run (float).

In addition to the selection of hull materials, the safety system and safety-related plans are hardly considered in the design of the submersible.

This is the design diagram of the submersible Titan, which is responsible for this exploration mission.

Titan is 22 feet (6.7m) long and weighs 23000 pounds (10432 kilograms). It has a lot of space inside, but can only hold up to five people.

This means that it will be subject to a lot of external pressure.

There was a toilet with no seats; five passengers had to sit cross-legged on the floor.

There are no windows except for passengers watching the portholes of the Titanic.

Ocean engineering experts say that increasing the design of the cabin space of the submersible will increase the pressure load in the middle, thereby increasing fatigue and stratified loads (delamination loads).

In the official design promotion of Ocean Gate, they gave other detailed parameters of Titan:

Https://oceangate.com/pdf/oceangate-titan-specs-lr.pdf

Titan weighs 9525 kilograms (21000 pounds) and can drive at a speed of 3 knots (3-1pm 2 mph) using electric thrusters.

Equipped with powerful LED lights, sonar navigation system and high-end camera equipment.

But there is no mention of the security system or the security emergency plan.

It is worth mentioning that the Titan only obtained the underwater seaworthiness certification of 1300 meters, but did not carry out the certification of 4000 meters.

Their own CEO has said publicly before that certification is an obstacle to innovation.

30 dollars, the game console can be controlled? Just as the Titanic had been repeatedly warned before the accident, there were many safety risks to sailing and the cruise ship itself.

The Ocean Gate's deep-sea submarine also pays homage to the Titanic in this respect.

The captain's disregard for safety and life eventually led to the same tragedy, adding another five to the death toll of the Titanic 111 years later.

And the most ridiculous thing is that the whole submarine is controlled by a game controller.

As early as last summer, when CBS interviewed CEO Stockton Rush of Ocean Gate, he was asked about the control system.

He confidently picked up a Logitech F710 game controller and said

We use it to control the whole ship, and there are some operations that you need to do with buttons.

Even, with no expertise, just a $30 video game controller, anyone can drive my submarine.

Has no one noticed the design flaw that the former executive warned five years ago but was fired?

In fact, as early as 18 years, Ocean Gate executives questioned that submersibles were not safe enough and should be tested more.

Foreign media revealed that the director of maritime operations of Ocean Gate was fired after expressing concern about its first carbon fiber hull and other systems before the maiden voyage.

The employee wrote a written document expressing "many concerns that could cause serious safety problems" to warn of the safety risks of submersibles.

"worry that visible defects in carbon fibers supplied to Ocean Gate will increase the risk of small defects expanding into larger tears during the pressure cycle."

He suggested that the hull of Titan must be non-destructive tested to ensure "strong and safe products".

But he was later told that such a test was impossible, and Ocean Gate used the above-mentioned "acoustic monitoring system" to avoid safety accidents.

This technology uses acoustic sensors to listen for the deterioration of carbon fiber in the hull.

So as to provide drivers with early warning detection, so that they have enough time to stop the descent and safely return to the surface.

Game console control + cabin with security risks + security system that detects that the cabin floats when there is a problem.

Emmmm, the editor already has a picture of the accident in his mind.

The employee also warned that the system would not expose defects until the ship descended, and then might only provide a "millisecond" warning before a catastrophic implosion.

CEO: the prophet, the knife!

Sure enough, the day after he submitted the written documents, he was held a meeting by CEO Rush, the company's director of human resources, engineering and operations.

At the meeting, he made it clear that he would not authorize Titan to conduct any manned tests without hull scanning, and was fired and escorted out of the building.

However, not only the executives of Ocean Gate, but also the director James Cameron of Titanic released in 1997 also pointed out the design flaws of Titanic.

He is an expert on submersibles and has dived into the scene of the shipwreck dozens of times.

In 2012, Cameron designed and test-piloted an experimental submersible and entered an area of the Pacific called the Challenger Abyss.

An implosion occurs when the squeezing pressure of the abyss causes a hollow object to collapse violently inward, he said.

Cameron strongly criticized Stockton Rush for never getting safety certification for tourist submersibles.

Here, Cameron once again talked about the hull material design of the Titan-carbon fiber composites, which has become its biggest weakness.

Although, this material is widely used in the aerospace industry and is much lighter than steel or aluminum.

The problem, however, is that carbon fiber composites have "no compressive strength"-imploding when the submersible falls deeper into the abyss and faces a sharp rise in water pressure.

He added that Ocean Gate used sensors in the Titan's hull to assess the state of the carbon fiber composite hull.

The company's promotional materials have pointed out that the sensor is an innovative function of "hull health monitoring".

Cameron says the sensor network on the hull of the submarine is not enough to solve what he believes is an inherently flawed design.

"it's not like the lights in your car are on when the gas is low, it's different. "

"the gate of the ocean" becomes the gate of life and death? "Ocean Gate" was established in 2009. Since 2010, the company has been offering commercial deep diving activities.

Transport passengers to explore deep diving along the coast of California, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic.

Later, CEO Stockton Rush found that visiting the site of the shipwreck can attract media attention.

In 2016, Ocean Gate used the submersible Cyclops 1 (Cyclops 1) for the first time to take passengers to the Andrea site to visit.

Since July 2021, the Titanic has conducted three expeditions to the wreckage of the Titanic.

During one of the visits, Arthur Loibl, a 60-year-old German tycoon and passenger, said the team encountered electrical problems during the trip, resulting in a five-hour delay in diving.

After launching, it was found that the stable tube support of the balanced submersible was broken and had to float and transfer in the deep sea of 1600 meters.

He also pointed out that the internal condition of the submersible was poor and there were design defects, and he thought the trip was like a "suicide mission" and that it was a fluke to be able to return safely.

In addition, during an expedition to the wreckage of the Titanic in 2022, one of Titanic's thrusters accidentally installed in the opposite direction, and it began to spin as it tried to move forward at the bottom of the sea.

In fact, there have been signs that diving on the Titan is tantamount to suicide.

However, there are still people who are willing to put themselves at risk.

Next time, the "door of the ocean" opens, but no more tragedies will happen.

Reference:

Https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7e7j8/coast-guard-debris-field-found-during-search-for-missing-titanic-submarine

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Xin Zhiyuan (ID:AI_era)

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