DISCLAIMER: intense yap session from someone PUTTING THINGS INTO LAYMEN’S TERMS to make it easier for everyone to understand 🙂↕️
As someone who’s Obsessed™️ with this tragically yet sadly predictable story, we’d like to take a moment and yap about how crazy insane the Real Time Acoustic Monitoring System for Carbon Fiber for a DEEP SEA PRESSURE VEHICLE is.
First of all. The fact that Stockton Rush decided to make a DEEP SEA PRESSURE VESSEL out of carbon fiber, a material that is famous for its tensile (pulling) strength NOT pressure (push). Pressure. Which is very much in the DEEP SEA. Where the VEHICLE is going (if we remember correctly, the pressure in the ocean increases by 10 atmospheres of pressure- ie 1 atmosphere of pressure being what the atmospheric pressure is at sea level -for every 10 meters you descend. Space, on the other hand, is between 1 and 0 atmospheres of pressure). The ocean wants to squish you into biological paste so, so, so, so, so very badly.
Everyone and their mother are telling Stockton Rush that using carbon fiber is a Shitass Bad Idea. Not only does logically it make no sense to use (again, good with PULLING not BEING PUSHED, which is what pressure is) but it just hasn’t been tested the way other materials, such as titanium, have been. We know what the failure point of titanium is. We know when Catastrophic Failure happens in titanium. We know how many cycles of fatigue/stress titanium can withstand before Catastrophic Failure happens. When know how titanium behaves Before That Happens.
Carbon fiber?? We don’t know those things about carbon fiber, when it comes to DEEP SEA PRESSURE FATIGUE/STRESS. It’s a material used for PULLING not PUSHING. So it hasn’t even been tested for DEEP SEA PRESSURE. Because it’s not meant for deep sea pressure. And we’re about to show you how very Not meant for DEEP SEA PRESSURE that carbon fiber is.
Here’s a generic chat that gives you an idea of what we mean when we say Titanium Is Predictable. This chart isn’t about titanium specifically, but we can pretend it is. You can look at the colors and understand what the chart is telling you. We can see the curve and what’s a Warning and what’s Bad. The red is Bad. You don’t want to be in the red. The curve of the chart shows that you have time to predict the red before it goes to red.
Here’s an actual chart of titanium under stress, along with a steel and aluminum. Ough wow!! Look at those curves!! You don’t have to know exactly what you’re looking at to see and understand that the curves happen before the lines “flatline”. There’s a predictability before the lines of the chart “go flat”. This means you can understand the integrity of the titanium you’re using, and whether or not it’s safe to use, whether it can be worked on, or if it needs to be retired altogether.
Now let’s look at carbon fiber.
There’s no curve. Carbon fibers works, until suddenly it doesn’t. There’s no prediction for catastrophic failure- it just happens.
AND STOCKTON RUSH IS USING THIS MATERIAL IN AN APPLICATION IT SPECIFICALLY DOESNT WORK WITH (pushing- NOT pulling).
Well. The thing about Stockton Rush is that he’s going to Do What He Wants. So he’s going to build his vessel out of expired carbon fiber. Because it’s cheaper to transport and manufacture (remember, he planned on having a whole fleet of these things). He wanted to spend as little money as possible while making back as much profit as possible.
And Stockton Rush, with his background in aviation (imagine. for a moment. if a NASCAR driver decided to make a commercial airplane, and only used his knowledge of racing cars to do it. because that’s essentially what’s happening here) decided to use a Real Time Acoustic Monitoring System. Because carbon fiber is made up is a bunch of threads of carbon “braided” (for lack of better term) together, when the UNPREDICTABLE- WE ALL SEE THAT CHART. WHERES THE CURVE RUSH- catastrophic failure happens, the threads “snap” apart as they break. So his thinking process is, the Real Time Acoustic Monitoring System would be able to “predict” when the carbon fiber was going to fail catastrophically.
For shits and giggles, here’s applications acoustic monitoring systems are used for:
Please note that DEEP SEA PRESSURE VEHICLES are not on there. Damn near the rest of this IS in planes, however.
And. C’mon. COME ON!!!!! LOOK at that chart!!!! Does it look like predicting the catastrophic failure of the carbon fiber is even going to matter?!? WHEN YOURE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE GOD DAMNED OCEAN?!? Catastrophic failure at the depths the Titanic is at means IMPLOSION. The Real Time Monitoring System is a fart in the wind. It’s Safety Theater (<- you will hear that a LOT when you watch documentaries and the investigation).
It actually fucking worked.
The Real Time Monitoring System actually DID work and actually DID predict the catastrophic failure of the carbon fiber before the catastrophic failure even happened.
This is the INNOVATION that Stockton Rush has had a hard on for since day one.
Except they’re loosing money. And as OP said, Stockton Rush was upset that the carbon fiber had the audacity to snap, crackle and pop at all.
He was so mad in fact that, as we found out during the US Coast Guards’ investigation, Stockton specifically had the graphs plotted for each dive in such a way so that the RTMS’ alert to the carbon fiber’s lack of structural integrity wasn’t readily obvious (instead of the graph showing the curves of stress fatigue, they were plotted to show depth with time).
Anyways. The fact that his crack pipe idea of using an acoustic monitoring system to predict a famously unpredictable material in an application it’s very much NOT used for and it actually WORKED is phenomenal. Unfortunately, Stockton Rush didn’t set out to find a way to make carbon fiber a viable material for deep sea pressure vessels, he set out to be “big swinging dick” like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. So he didn’t care, and how he’s dead because of his own hubris.
@voidofteeth our Boat Explodey buddy 🥫💥
