Engineering assessment of the OceanGate Titan failure
After an initial reluctance to follow this story, mostly due to the hysterical media coverage of a pointless rescue operation, my engineering half of my brain got interested. I am by no means a materials engineer nor a naval architect, but I was involved in some Design FMEAs and wrote thesis about the manufacturing of structural, pressurized aerospace carbon fiber parts.<p>Some things I came across, which are in line with the article and the first spurce video:<p>- The view port was not rated for the intended operating depth, if true I am out of words...<p>- the pre-preg material was apparently beyond shelf life, if true almost as bad as the view port. When pre-preg is beyong shelf life, the resign doesn&#x27;t reliable bond anymore. That means basically delaminated layers before the &quot;vessel&quot; saw water for the first time<p>- 480(!) layers of carbon fibre, that carries the risk of prematurw dryong of the resin during production. Impact, see above.<p>- not curing and no auto-clav, again with the same results as above<p>- The mating rings for the emd caps have been glued on. Nothing wrong with that per se, but a bond supposed to sustain repeated dives to 4,000 m needs to be <i>very</i> precise. Ocean Gate applied the glue manually by hand, with inconsistent thickness in a non-clean enviroment. No idea to which tolerances the CFC hull and rings have been machined, but based the video of the bonding (they used chains attached to gate crane) they didn&#x27;t seem to be too precise. The results are a high potential of foreign objects and debris being glued in, non-defined wiggle room between the CFV hull and the titanium rings and end caps and yet another strucural weakness of the vessel.<p>- they also used titanium fibre. If trued, it doesn&#x27;t matter because the preasure was applied from the outside, all the tensile streangth of carbon and titano fibers only worls against preasure from inside the vessel.<p>- No back-ups, exposed wiring at the outside, flamable material at the inside, no telemetry, no emergency beacon, only wireless (!) controls (and they didn&#x27;t even do enough testing to find key mapping errors of their Logitech controller...)<p>- Despite claiming otherwise on their homepage (archive.org still has it) they did attach equipmwnt directly to the carbon hull on the inside by <i>screwing</i> (!) to the hull. Result, all the fibers cut by the screws don&#x27;t take any load whatsoever anymore, increased risk of delaminations (the hull is compressed, the screw on the inside isn&#x27;t)<p>- Safety culture: completely absent, to the point of being proud about it. Unable to distinguosh between vessel certification and proper operations (there is a reason that aerospace certifies the design, production, maintenance and operations organisation seperately), firing people raising concerns, I am out of words here..<p>- The vessel can only be opened from the <i>outside</i> (!), so even a perfect dive can lead to suffocation is the vessel isn&#x27;t located fast enough...<p>I could go on, but calling this abomination &quot;engineering&quot; is an insult to the universe.<p>Finally, some potential failure modes:<p>- the view port (obviously)<p>- the hull (delamination, stress, bad material, intentionally induced defects...)<p>- the bond between the rings for the end caps and the hull (weakened bond due to different deformation of the two materials, weak bond due to foreign objects, inconsistens bond due to bad application of the glue...)<p>All in all, from design over manufacturing to maintenance and operations, this thing was a death tral whos only upside was a quick death in case of an implosion.