sub build underway christmas 2011

I hope you aren't talking about nuclear power. Military subs require many trained crew to operate, and getting spares for them would be a nightmare.

 

not even remotely

 

Tugboat, how did you come up with a 10000 nautical mile range for this vessel. That seems a bit on the generous side. Can you tell us a bit more about the diesel-electric propulsion system? If it has an electric drive system it might work...may be quiet too. What sort of diesel generator/ac drive unit does it have? I know Siemens makes electric drive units for ships. They run pretty quiet.

 

JT,

Tug is long gone, this environment is to hostile for him, he couldn't stand the "pressure".

You may want to try PM'ing him.

-Tom

 

He seems set on building it and didn't want to be questioned as to safety. I think he only wanted people to look at his youtube site. Too dangerous and risky a project for me. But more power to him if he succeeds. Time will tell.

 

Well, the material test was a bit rudamentary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1qNxkWQxdQ

With concrete fracturing I would be more concerned about pinholes/pressure loss. From what I can see the cost of this project will likely exceed his resources. His pressure gage was purchased off of e-bay, for example.

Not a good sign. I would suggest he arrange a tour on a civilian or military sub (e.g. special arrangement) and get the project out of his system. Too many areas raise safety concerns. He's got a family and that's what's more important. :idea:

 

Hammer tests seems to be quite popular nowadays.. Maybe there's a point somewhere thou I fail to see it

 

Uniform and void-free reinforced concrete may well be an excellent structural material, but I would be concerned about things like engineering solutions to the load distribution around ports, hatches, through hull connections etc, as well as the obvious ones around getting the whole pressure hull uniform and void free, with no dry bonds.

When the hull is loaded with a uniform external pressure I wonder how the local stress concentrations change around openings? It's inevitable that hatches and their frames will have a different stiffness to the hull (because of the differing Young's modulus values for the material and the section sizes), which must impact on the way the material behaves. It's easy to model this in steel, but quite a challenge to understand how home-made reinforced concrete might behave, I'd have thought.

 

Also in conventional submarines, the pressure hull and the outer hull are separate structures. Modeling stresses on a cylinder is a lot less complex than a teardrop.

 

...and, what about the cylinder ends...?

-Tom

 

AN EVEN PRESSURE DISTRIBUTION BECAUSE IT'S STILL A CONSTANT RADIUS

 

We are not doing any stinking modeling here:

1) "security blankets such as rubber stamps and -theory- math and conventional if this is your methodology...remember conventional came about on empirical testing and failures...not on paper-"

 

You're suggesting half spheres then?

-Tom

 

Its best not to know of possible failures - it ruins all the fun.

Conventional principles never came from empirical testing! Conventional came from people calculating what caused the disaster, and applying the calculations to future projects.

This "make it and see if it breaks" is for the rich and foolhardy.

 

I'd wait on advice from the ghost of Karl Donitz before proceeding with the build.