Tiangou wrote:
[quote=Will Collier]
[quote=ztirffritz]
One of my favorite YouTube channels reviewed the titan sub disaster and the results were not pretty.
https://youtu.be/6LcGrLnzYuU
He also arrived at the same conclusion that I did that compression loading of a material designed for tensile loading is a very very bad idea.
Yeah, I don't understand that at all. It's a day-one thing in any strengths of materials or composites class.
There were some experiments with carbon fiber at depths 20 years ago that were very promising, and there are supposedly teams working now to perfect the binding agents (epoxies) and solve the delamination problems. Since this relates to all manner of deep-sea industries (fiber cables and oil/gas pipelines), there's money behind it and a will to create reliable long-term solutions.
Had this company done the appropriate testing, I'm sure they would still be years away from manned missions.
In 10-15 years, we will probably have perfectly good carbon fiber pressure vessels suitable for deep sea exploration.
Yes, I suggested the same thing in a previous thread. More and more these past few days, I've been thinking why wasn't the potential risks adequately understood by the engineers? Like Will said, it's elementary knowledge that is taught to all engineers in college very early. There's nothing wrong with trying it, and it may well prove to be safe, but it was ground breaking and so should've had a lot more (years) of research and development behind it. It's because of incidents like these in the past that the aerospace world takes a cautious approach to fielding new technology. All one has to look at is the use of composites for primary structure in aircraft, which comes on the heels of decades of research and development in the use of composites in secondary or non-structural applications.