DSV Alvin : How to build a safe submersible 

As a ham radio operator I'd wish to know more about the underwater telephone. The first time I heard about it, I thought it was just converting the audio signal to an amplitude modulated radio signal with no carrier frequency. I believe for that you don't need much more than a microphone, a good amplifier and a very long cable or coil as an antenna. The detector is almost the same in reverse: a big coil, an amplifier and a speaker. If you want to make it really simple, you can even use the speaker as an inductive microphone and a flip switch to switch between reception and transmission. Anyway, that's my theory so far. But it's hard to imagine that they used no carry frequency, as I believe you could have gotten disturbances from the machine room on such low frequencies - even from mechanical systems.

@@tigerchills2079I can never get my head around ham radio stuff, but my first thoughts were exactly the same as yours. Turns out it uses USB modulation but via sound waves instead if EM waves. Exactly how that works, and the physical mechanism for it, I’m not smart enough to understand.

@@Alexander-the-ok Ah, that's interesting. Upper Side Band, that's half of an amplitude modulated signal, which otherwise is a symmetrical signal around the carrier frequency. So, it's sound waves and no radio waves. Alright, that means they actually use pressure waves in the water to transmit the signal to the next vessel. I guess that could be called a transducer. Maybe submarine/submersible comm's expert can fill in the blanks, but thank you for sharing what you got on the topic

How is “high frequency doesn’t travel further, it’s attenuated and travels less far” NOT a correction?

@@tigerchills2079 Which makes it all the more laughable that the Titan submersible was touted as being the iPhone of underwater exploration when they're all but relying on Morse code for communication. What a complete jackass.

No, it requires cash, plain and simple. Someone building a $1.2 million sub that made it to Titanic twice is actually kind of incredible considering Alvin's most recent update alone cost $41 million. Alvin was built to take a few down. The person who discovers a way for the average person to explore the deep ocean will have to experiment with cheaper materials that don't cost $41 million out of pocket just to update. And a good many of those people experimenting will die. But it's worth it (as long as they're willing to do it on their own and without passengers). But anyway, yeah, safety costs money.

Alvin has not been without problems. With each problem the Alvin has been improved to deal with it. Over 60 years and thousands of dives the managers of the Alvin have learned a lot and have denied nothing.

@@ko7577all the cash in the world can’t stop a man from saying “looks good to me” and pocketing the remainder. Money can’t buy integrity.

@@ko7577 It requires thinking about everything and then raising the cash to do it. If you don't have the cash, whether through VC or your own money, don't bother.

As NASA once said, "quadruple failure that isn't supposed to be possible", after it was proven it is possible, and happening right now, suddenly quadruple redundancy isn't good enough even for ground operations.

i do hope you'll make it nice and cheap so its accessible to small fortune billionaires like me, maybe try composite hulls?

​@@fuckoff4705I was thinking of a hull made out of papier-maché.

He could buy the composite second hand so that its accessible to us millionaires too!

@@benjaminrogers9848 ooh, good call. What are we going to do about controlling it, though? All I got is this shitty Logitech controller.

What the heck, let's throw it in for the memes

What an amazing experience, I’m so jealous. The Shinkai is a wonderful craft. Unfortunately it’s a difficult one to research - I wish I could speak japanese!

Along with the precursor to the Alvin, the DOWB, from General Motors Defense Research Labs. I worked on it, and designed equipment for it.

I've seen some video, it looks like the floor and seat cushions are thicker than any other crafts, must be a comfortable ride.

@@brunonikodemski2420whats ur position on the project what did you work on?

This is great How was it down ther?

The biggest buoyancy aspects are probably the steel weights and the droppable batteries. The thruster dropoffs would only be useful in case of entanglement

@@oblivion_2852 For sure! But the last-resort was also meant to be used if Alvin was hopelessly entangled with something on the seafloor, meaning that theoretically a single fishing net could cause the loss of everything except the pressure sphere. Now it just means the loss of much smaller, much cheaper components.

To be honest the crew sphere separation function was really cool, even if it was suboptimal, and part of me is sad to see it go

Yeah, that's how a bunch of "old white men" design a DSV. Honestly, I don't buy the line about wanting to inspire young people. That sounded like corporate fluff to hide an unpalatable truth. He was either to cheap to use experienced personnel or knew that he couldn't bully them like he did with his entry level engineers. What really makes me angry is that his stupidity/egomania killed four other people and left a professional black mark on the engineers he hired "to inspire", as well as the psychological burden of knowing that their inexperience/negligence contributed to the disaster. If it had just been him on the sub, I'd say it couldn't have happened to a nicer person.

Thanks. Yeah, the two aren’t even comparable

Titan was meant to bring people down to titanic, Alvin was designed to get people back.

Yeah, the bottom of the ocean is one of the most extreme environments we can actually reach with people (and have any hope of surviving/returning); even space is way less extreme (though has the additional danger of having basically zero prospect for rescue) in most respects. But because deep-sea diving has the benefit of having relative safety a handful of kilometers (or less) away, it allows for all sorts of brilliant ways to increase safety through excellent engineering and design. Alvin shows so many smart methods/approaches this regard that it's an undeniable testament to the designers' prioritization of safety and reliability.

And arriving at a position, it now is.

This feels like a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide… 😂

@@TheVeganarchism it's a reference to a (bad) explanation of a missile guidance system from around the mid 20th century

​@@snark894It's not so much "bad" as it is "unnecessarily long-winded and convoluted." The description itself is accurate enough, but they used way too many words to say something that could be made a lot simpler.

@@TheVeganarchismit is most assumably not

Thanks. Yeah that was just a quick ‘throw it together for a 10 second video segment’ but a lot of commenters seem interested. I may revisit it in the future.

A soda bottle holds pressure quite well up to 2-3 bar, but I wouldn't stand near it during the test.

Also I'm fairly sure a lot of ping-pong balls aren't ABS but rather nitrocellulose.

@@AndyAz How would you get the ball inside? I guess there are jars and bottles with larger lids but they probably can't take so much pressure.

​@@MattOGormanSmith In my childhood testing Gatorade bottles can reach slightly higher pressures than most other soft drink bottles although it will noticeably deform pretty quickly.

Funny story: My father and Al Gore presented Jacques with his lifetime achievement award but my father had given my sister and me a quick golf lesson up at our elementary school where I got laid flat by a golf ball hitting my forehead, no biggie, and my sister then splits my dad's forehead with an iron which obviously needed stitches but no time for that. Al's makeup crew saved the day by using superglue and an extra shirt as it wouldn't stop bleeding. Not really an Al fan but Jacques most definitely as I am of my father.

You can *hear* how happy he is to talk about an actually good submersible in his voice. It's adorable.

...and we can hear your furry balls scratching up against your skirt. 😂

Along with the precursor to the Alvin, the DOWB, from General Motors Defense Research Labs. I worked on it, and designed equipment for it.

From an undercover ballistic missile sub operation to the most famous shipwreck in modern history, Alvin's had quite a wild ride - but thankfully that ride was implosionless.

"EV Nautilus" does great yt deep sea research. The researchers are on the SURFACE ship. The rest is all remote hardware. My favorite episode has to be the one when a sperm whale slowly swam out of the dark, unexpected, and did quite a lot of looking over the ROV.

Thanks. Ironically, the UK is still stuck in a ridiculous ‘inbetween’ where imperial units crop up all over the place. They are very rare in industry though (with some exceptions).

Oh, glad we’ve stopped using Freedom Units, they’re much more archaic.

As a US civil engineer, I'm still plagued with imperial units; we even use a hilarious unit called a Kip, which is 1000 pounds (kip = kilo-pound). Steel is 490 pounds per cubic foot Reinforced concrete is 150 pcf Water is 62.4 pcf Saltwater is 65 pcf Could be worse. In college we measured hydrostatic force in slugs.

Ping Pong balls do buckle, at any internal pressure. This is a mechanical asymmetry issue, also valid in any pressure applications. When we were modeling the DOWB, it was obvious that the symmetry is vital. As a result, much of the steel body was actually machined away (both sides), to make as much equality as practical (based on empirical data and testing of small-scale thinner models). This was also true of nuclear weapons "cores", where the pressure was externally applied. See books by Rhodes, about how they did this for nukes.

​@@brunonikodemski2420⁶⁶66😅😅

A hull penetrator is used-have a Google, bit technical to explain here

​@@noksucowboydoes Google autocorrect to hole penetrator? Seems like a risky google...

@@phillyphakename1255 as long as you don't act on it, you'll be fine

To be fair almost all Deep sea subs have gone through the same certification process as Alvin

I’d go in any of the current operational DSVs. They are all similarly built and certified

You should prefer the Limiting Factor

@@AhmedKhan-qk3xi only slightly though, unless youre in water deeper than alvin can handle of course

@@AhmedKhan-qk3xi papa Gaben's sub is the most based, for sure. Also the only 2 seater full ocean depth dsv anyway, so the only option unless he's a certified sub pilot himself

Lmao

you should try carbon fibre

Thanks, there is more on the way.

Thanks. I hadn't even thought about shell buckling for at least 7 years before this so that part gave me some flashbacks

Yeah I don't remember a lot from my strengths of materials courses, but I do remember that compared to simple tension or compression, buckling modes of failure were many and complicated.

Also, given that it's owned by the navy, I'd be willing to bet that it's fitted with essentially the same inertial navigation package as the rest of the submarine fleet. The exact performance of that system is shrouded in mystery (i.e. it's classified), but from what we do know, it's orders of magnitude more precise again than the systems used on airliners and can go for _months_ with no external navaids without accumulating more than a few meters of drift.

My thoughts exactly. I thought that gyro seemed like overkill until I remembered it's a Navy vessel!

@@AJMansfield1The system isn’t exactly secret - it’s a SEADeViL INS system (and the Alvin’s companion ROV Jason II has the same system). The military secret squirrel stuff is the magnetic and gravitational anomaly detection systems that let the attack submarines see surface ships and submarines without using active sonar.

laser ring gyroscopes were developed to orientate the hypersonic anti ballistic missile called sprint in the 1970s

You've just reminded me, I forgot to add that to the sources list! That is a great documentary.

That's a bad attitude to have. Don't ever convince yourself that your safety and judgement is somebody else's responsibility. Especially don't teach your kids that if you give the slightest care about them

@@SuperPhunThyme9 You're absolutely right. So, before you go out and drive or walk on streets, be sure to complete your own safety certification on that truck that's careening your way. It's OK though, the trucking company says they have perfect safety and maintenance records! Do you do your own brake jobs?

@@brianwelch1579No but it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the typical vehicle on the street is operated by an inattentive idiot - and not stand in front of it.

@@SuperPhunThyme9 Unfortunately a lot of people do not have the technical knowledge to properly judge if something is safe or not. Someone who doesn't even change the oil in their own car is unlikely to seek out technical information on whether that car was designed well and even less likely to be able to comprehend it.

It's almost impossible to talk about Inertial guidance now without accidentally saying 'it knows where it is because it knows where it isn't...'

INS tells you your position in space. It needs to be corrected for the movement of the planet and solar system around it (it is that precise). It will directly give you longitude based on reading the rotation of the earth around its parked reference plane.

You mean Ice Road Trucker and Ancient Aliens channels.

The ridiculous inspiration for that quote is here: what-if.xkcd.com/115/#:~:text=You%20would%20spend%20one%20nanosecond,your%20retinal%20cells%20quieted%20down.

And not only that, but do it relatively safely, as the existing world "fleet" of deep sea submersibles has shown.

I resisted discussing the swordfish as it’s a pretty well told story at this point

Don't have to worry about swordfish much anymore. Humans have done a good job of near sterilizing the oceans with the over fishing that goes on ..

Thanks very much. I’ll be doing similar presentations going forward

That’s such a compliment. Thanks.

Yep, 99% of it is 'are you _sure_ you remembered your toothbrush', and then the other 1% is 'whoops I _did_ forget my toothbrush' - only instead of an inconvenience it's death.

​​@@TheLoneWolflingorse than the toothbrush, leaving your passport in the safe of the hotel room is a massive mistake. I always made a point of checking everything before leaving, until that one time I forgot to check the safe... there is a reason why checklists exist.

I mean.... just build another Aluminaut. Room to stand up for 7 and it even takes like 20 s to walk from one end to the other. Went to 4000 m, at one point holding the record. It's even a cylinder with two half spherical endcaps. But all one material and that material is beautiful shiny luminum... Did like 300 dives and it's still around.

It'll be interesting to see if submersible tourism picks up again. These vehicles are very expensive and highly specialised, hence they're only generally used for research, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with using them for tourism, especially if the profits go towards funding more expeditions.

@@Croz89 It's very much alive and well, all over the world. What isn't are DSV's the D being key generally below 500 m, definetly around 1000 m or lower. Neither military nor tourist boats go that deep. They remain comfortably in the above 500 m category, which is deep AF. Plenty pressure to implode in milliseconds. Some of the prettiest (and I guess technically advanced) are built by Triton. They built the currently highest performance, fancy DSV that holds all the records these days and it is fully certified to take paying passengers down. Generally scientists but Hamish Harding took her down to 12 km (DSV Limiting Factor). But you can buy less fancy ones. A million bucks is a good place to start. There are some below but not by a lot haha. And if you want the fancy ones that go extra deep (still not DSV) it's more like 3-4 million. So buying one and then making profit with passengers is something many companies do. It's kinda how Oceangate started, with a 500 m sub. Then they went off and... did their own thing. But there exists a relatively large commercial sub industry. Especially very shallow stuff to maybe 50 m or so there is plenty and it's not crazy expensive. I mean it is but like expensive business class or cheap first type of expensive. Not sell your house expensive. So if you wanna do it and you have a lower middle class job it's very achievable. Some might think you could spend the money more wisely. They are wrong of course.

I had great teachers like him. At my undergraduate and post graduate engineering school. Some really brilliant minds who were experts at communicating their expertise. High School teachers are paid shit and treated like dirt. Places like Switzerland understand this and teachers of all levels are extremely well paid compared to ours, with all the education and expectations that bring on their level of competence. They understand why providing quality education is paramount.

I certainly would have made different choices if high school maths and physics made this much sense.

@@carlost856 my wife is a high school teacher. She works so much harder than I do, it’s genuinely embarrassing, yet she makes less than half the salary I do. It’s really quite depressing how little we value teachers as a society.

@@Alexander-the-ok yeah even the good ones get burned out from the shit conditions.

Thanks. That was a last minute idea tbh

Reading historical accounts of pilots' thoughts about that, the release mechanism and protocols seemed janky as hell! Pilots used to carry a hacksaw to cut through the release bolt in case it jammed, and the functionality was never field tested (for obvious reasons). I suspect the more refined individual component detach procedures may be safer overall.

@@Alexander-the-ok Interesting! One quibble: I have seen video of it being tested in the field. A Periscope Films RU-vid upload. It was clearly the 1964 version based on your wonderful envelope, and may have not been that deep. But it always seemed to me like it should have been the most reliable way back, though I also wondered if it might surface so fast that the crew would be injured after it breached and then fell back down and started bobbling.

@@PetesGuide Just looking at the design, it appears very unstable and I can it imagine it rolling badly on the surface.

The Russian Alpha class submarines had the same system - the submarines sail included a rescue capsule with enough room for the entire crew.

@@Alexander-the-ok tried to link to the RU-vid video showing the detachment, but it got deleted. Check your spam comments folder and release it if you think others would enjoy it. 😊

Actually I thought the ballast used on the Titan is quite smart too. It's basically some construction grade steel bars. No need to leave your very expensive air tank behind.

Where would you even look up how much concentration of certain minerals/chemicals can differ thousands of meters under the sea to get even a decent estimate over what range of chemical water composition×pressure to test those water degradedable links under. Where would you even start with that?

@@modernsolutions6631 With SCIENCE.

@@modernsolutions6631 The concentration of those soluble compounds in seawater at any depth will not influence the time it takes to dissolve the links. Temperature is uniform enough to be a known factor.

@@modernsolutions6631 The difference between 0 and 0,0001 is not relevant in this situation.

They are really difficult to compare as they are entirely different classes of vessel. I did some work with mapping data for the limiting factor a few years ago though, it is a fantastic bit of kit.

Spot on: there is a ‘penetrator plate’ on the back with bulkhead connectors. I couldnt find a huge amount of info on it so i left it out

This is hilarious because I had EXACTLY the same 'table tennis learning journey' as you! I'd seen the videos of people setting buckets of them on fire and creating an inferno because of the flammability of nitrocellulose. But yep, when I looked it up - ABS now.

When they made the shift there was a big thing about how the new plastic balls didn't spin as well and bounced a little differently. I think the quality of the balls has improved a lot since though.

I didn't know nitrocellulose had been replaced with ABS. In mid-2000s, I watched someone light a ping pong ball, and it disappeared in a flash of orange flame, leaving no ash.

@@patnolen8072 We used to make smoke bombs with them wrapped in aluminium foil when I was a kid. No idea how it actually worked but I saw it being done.

Thanks! There should be plenty more of the same over the next few months.

@@Alexander-the-ok looking forwards to it!

"They started using the name Alvin for the sub to honor the prime mover and creative inspiration for the vehicle, Allyn Vine. The name also benefited from belonging to a popular cartoon chipmunk, but Dr. Vine was the true namesake."

And the pos that Stockton cobbled together was called Titan. The nerve of that man rofl

What would you call it, the MOIST PENETRATOR? The SEA BREACHER? The DEPTH TREADER?

"Oh no! The device is sunk and lost forever. Nothing goes that deep." "Wrong! Release the DEPTH TREADER!"

@@user-dd3lx9tt5v Bobby. Bobby the Ball. It's a ball. And it bobs.

Good point. The material properties given are at 25 degrees C. Obviously my 'test' and calculations were extremely crude though.

Not exactly - submarine (main) ballast tanks are not pressure rated. Variable ballast tanks, or trim tanks are however pressure rated and use pumps to transfer water or I gest/expel water.

His diving saucer is still one of the only pumpjet propelled submersibles to my knowledge. I wonder why that's not more common. Many SSGNs use pumpjets.

We all have different risk tolerances and appetites and that's a good thing - the world would suck if we were all the same. Personally I'd jump at the chance for a dive in Alvin (well I would have when I worked at a science organisation - not sure I'd want to larp as an explorer with no purpose).

@@Alexander-the-ok well they do call it 'bleeding edge' technology - you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs I guess. for me, the risks hugely outweigh the gains of doing such trips. if I am a researcher, I don't want to get recognition on my works posthumously lol.

I'd imagine remotely operated vehicles have their own unique engineering challenges but have likely matured a great deal even in the last few decades, let alone since Alvin's original hull was laid down over half a century ago. Crewed submersibles were the convention at the time and I imagine the benefits in the form of situational awareness, adaptability, rapid response time and other such factors of a hosting a human crew member are weighed carefully against the challenges of providing life support and carrying that mass versus eliminating it entirely- it's a similar situation to carrying human crews on space vehicles. Today's hardware is sufficiently powerful, robust and reliable enough that eliminating the crew capsule and support systems from the vehicle entirely and transmitting sensor data through an umbilical from unmanned parasite vessel to a remote operation suite on the mothership is quite economical.

ROV’s have the ability to kill people working around them - just not generally when in use. The manipulators and pressure tanks are quite capable of pureeing anyone who gets in their way (like all industrial robots). Has power - has hazard.

Deep sea ROVs need a tether; radio doesn’t do well underwater. And tethers can tangle on debris etc. So there’s always going to be a need for a crewed vehicle - though probably not a very big need; it’s likely that a lot of stuff that Alvin does could be done by a ROV. And in a few years we can probably make a tetherless AI ROV that would totally do everything else. Let’s put it this way; if we didn’t have anything like Alvin now would we build it? Maybe not, or maybe it would only be billionaires using them to do record breaking dives.

Oceangate was obvioudly a quick scam attempt. 250k$ per passenger, 5 passengers. 1 trip per week. They expected to have people pay a total of 1.250 million$/week to ride that shit. It was made with off the shelf parts and just glued togueter. Its failure wasnt an unfortunate incident, it was expected by a shitton of engineers and deep diving experts. The CEO said that he refused to get it certified because “he knew it wouldnt pass” Thoses are literally the words the CEO used on camera, its all recorded. “Failure to pass certification” in the case of a deep sea vessel…that pretty much means its a death trap… The CEO said in that same interview that “they wont let it pass certification because dont want him to succeed and innovate technology that they want to keep as it is, and want to see oceangate fail” That is incredibly delusional and narcissist. They dont want to give you cerification because they dont certify vessels that cant do what their certification claims it can do, its that fucking simple… Its like if you tried to get your wooden chimney certified as “safe” during a building inspection… Its WOOD, in a fireplace chemeny, OF COURSE IT WONT PASS