How Titan was Built, Lost and Found: An Analysis

ladies and gentlemen it's your friend Mike Brady from ocean liner designs uh coming to you from the tail end of what has been a fairly difficult and confronting week for people interested in Maritime history and the maritime world as a whole this week we had two pretty shocking pieces of news the first was that a vessel off of Greece had capsized carrying hundreds of people on board with hundreds of lives lost the second piece of news was that of course the Ocean Gate submersible vessel Titan had disappeared it's obviously impossible not to compare the um scope and tragedy of the two two disasters and there's been a lot of talk about that on the internet the purpose of this video is to look at some of the techniques involved in locating the wreck of Titan and there's a few more developments actually since I wrote the um the points for the script of this video so I at certain points we at certain points I'll be going off um script to explain but I thought you might be interested in some of the techniques and some of the Technologies involved in actually locating the wreck because this week there's been a lot of words being thrown around sonar radar Sono buoys so no boys you know that kind of thing so I thought I'd explain some of it for you and just look at the technical aspects we're not going to be going into a lot of conjecture because as always the internet has been full of conjecture and misinformation of course the submersible was lost with five people on board including somebody who was a personal hero of mine and many within the ocean liner Community Paul Henry najalay or pH as he was known a giant in his field and just an absolute Legend So yeah it's been it's been pretty tough and I don't think the ocean lighter and Titanic Community is particularly big so it feels a little bit like we've lost some family here and uh yeah I think we're all all very sad avoided making this or any video for about a week or so as the events have unfolded but I feel like now I've got some more input and can speak to some of the more technical parts of the situation which is more in the character of the channel so I'm going to split this video up into a couple of Parts first I'll explain why companies like Ocean Gate even dive to the Titanic in the first place then we'll look at the submersible Titan itself and how it was built and then finally the techniques that have been used and the immense challenges inherent in the Epic search for the submarine so first of all why do we dive the wreck of the Titanic why do we continue to do so Titanic's rate was found back in in 1985 by Dr Robert Ballard and his and his team she's resting almost four kilometers down that's something like 12 500 feet in absolutely crushing crushing depth and since then there have been dozens of Dives out to the wreck of Titanic in in all different kinds of submersibles the most famous probably being Alvin uh owned by the U.S Navy and operated by Woods Hole oceanographic Institute that's been in service since 1964. Alvin's Got 5 000 Dives under its belt and it's still in service today the two mere submarines James Cameron used those quite extensively you've seen them if you've watched the movie Titanic you've seen those um tried and true brilliant craft just recently laid up but could probably still work just fine you know just a month ago we made a video on this channel about the really exciting things that were being done by Magellan and Atlantic Productions in scanning the Titanic wreck and taking photographs of it and turning that into a photogrammetry model so there's still clearly a lot of interest in the Titanic and I feel like a lot of this is being mischaracterized as some kind of just millionaires fully that they're just running to you know they call it the tourist submarine experience which is uh just not true Ocean Gate is a legitimate scientific research organization it's privately funded the CEO was Mr Stockton Rush who's um in the casualty list who was lost in the submersible the primary stated goal of Ocean Gate is to examine the Titanic for two reasons predominantly for science so the Titanic wreck is interesting because it rests on the sea floor in what is essentially an underwater desert it's not flat there are mountains about as tall as those that we have on the surface here like Mount Everest for example there are basins Titanic itself rests in like kind of like a valley between all these big mountainous ranges underwater but because it's so deep there's not a wide variety of Life all over the place like in sea on a coral reef for example there's sparse pieces here and there you kind of have to know what you're looking for the Titanic by sheer nature of it being so big has now turned into something like a a bit of an oasis you know in this desert now there's hundreds and hundreds of species of not only animals like you know rat tail fish and things like that but also microbes that were previously unknown to science and they actually named one after Titanic it was discovered as late as 2010 and it was uh called hallamonus titanike so we're still learning things about our planet and the whole point of Ocean Gate was to use the Titanic as an opportunity to teach the world about things that we didn't know about the oceans you know very famously they say that we know probably more about space than we do about the bottom of the ocean to fund this venture Ocean Gate also allowed for civilians to come along and receive some minimal training as Mission Specialists and just kind of go down on the Dives but to my knowledge they weren't running Dives purely for tourists reasons just for people to go and sightsee these were scientific expeditionary Dives they were capturing capturing data points and then they would have civilians along to to fund it so we dive the Titanic to learn about the science to learn about our our world things we don't know and also to learn about the history you know Titanic has been shrouded in um mystery and Intrigue and total misinformation so you know reviewing it keeping the historical records straight Ocean Gate has got us some of the most incredible um footage of the Titanic and unbelievable quality that would have been Unthinkable you know decades ago that's just you know in the last couple years was front page news but the the actual mission statement of Ocean Gate was was a legitimate scientific scientific one so that's why we dive the Titanic Titanic is kind of like the sugar that sweetens the medicine as it were I use it on my channel if you watch any of my videos like the one I did the other week about how did they navigate Titanic well congratulations because now you understand how almost every other ship from that era navigated because Titanic used the same stuff so you put it in the context of Titanic people will click people are interested in it and people will learn a lot so let's talk about the submersible Titan why is it not a submarine this is a semantic thing but as submersible as a vehicle that can submerge but is predominantly reliant on exterior support so in the case of Titan she was not Tethered to the Mothership but relied on navigational inputs and things like that a submarine is almost a completely self-independent vehicle that it wouldn't need exterior support to operate or function correctly so that's the difference between the two and that's why Titan is more correctly referred to as a submersible but of course the terms are being used interchangeably so I'm not I'm not a pit ant about using the right term so if I alternate between submersible and submarine please forgive me the guiding philosophy around Titan's design and construction with Simplicity we've seen the news make a huge deal out of the fact that a simple games controller a Logitech Bluetooth controller was used to control the submarine um this doesn't smack of uh last minute unpreparedness or cheapness this is almost kind of becoming standard practice the US Navy for example the submarine USS Colorado has employed almost identical controllers for operating um the subs weapons some of the weapon systems to operate the photonic masts which essentially replace the Periscope in a submarine so it's easy it's intuitive and it's simple and it's try it is tried and true you know these are OEM Parts they are off the shelf but they're off the shelf because they are tried and true and you can use them now how is Titan built and what made it unique well recently many experts have come forward claiming that they were concerned about the way the submersible was designed and constructed so let's look at why and how Titan was a departure from traditional deep sea submersible design first I need to introduce you to Alvin Alvin is a research deep sea submersible first introduced in 1964 with around 5 000 Dives under its belt and it's still in service today most deep sea submersibles follow Alvin's pattern of design at its core if you strip away all the surface level exterior stuff the submersible is built around this crew compartment called the pressure vessel everything outside of this compartment is simply equipment which by themselves don't need protection from the crushing water pressure at depth but everything inside the pressure vessel must be protected including the crew so the pressure vessel has to be able to stand up to the insane conditions in the case of the Titanic wreck site the pressure is about 400 times that on the surface or the equivalent of six thousand pounds per square inch or three tons of pressure per square inch to survive this kind of insane Force the Alvin's pressure vessel is a special shape it's a sphere a ball made out of titanium which is itself an immensely strong metal with a wall thickness of about two inches or five centimeters this is important so I'm going to keep it here on screen the pressure vessel can fit three crew and their equipment but why is the pressure vessel in the shape of a ball well a sphere is extremely good a uniformly Distributing the pressures of deep water being perfectly round there are virtually no weak spots where pressures can focus and build up the entire structure reinforces itself now let's look at Titan Beneath The Superficial paneling on the outside the submersible was also built around a pressure vessel but this one was not in the shape of a ball but a cylinder why the departure from tried and true engineering well this could be linked to Ocean Gate's business model taking civilian backers as Mission crew to help fund the research for this Titan would simply need to carry more people you could try and cram 5 into a sphere that you'd need to make it larger than Alvin's pressure vessel and the bigger the sphere gets the weaker it is so then the walls would need to be made thicker but then you've added a lot of extra weight remember the sub still needs to be able to power itself along underwater and even be plucked from the ocean at the end of the mission so it can't be too heavy instead Titan would employ a long cylindrical pressure vessel that could fit five which was two more people than Alvin so how do you make a cylinder able to withstand the pressures of the ocean well Ocean Gate decided to use carbon fiber to create the cylindrical pressure vessel and this is an actual video of them making the pressure vessel this was a wound carbon fiber Hull where they literally wound strands of carbon fiber over a cylinder until the desired wall thickness was achieved that wall thickness a whopping 12.7 centimeters or 7 inches this is a huge jump on Alvin's two inches because the cylindrical pressure vessel was much bigger and its shape was possibly not as Adept at evenly Distributing the compressive forces at depth so the wall simply had to be thicker so now you have a carbon fiber tube that needs to be made watertight so the carbon fiber was capped at either end with titanium rings which would be used to then attach the hemisphere end pieces which were also very heavily reinforced made out of titanium after the carbon fiber pressure vessel was formed the titanium rings were bonded to it at either end so the exact method of bonding is a mystery to me but articles online from when this was done in 2017 focus on tight engineering tolerances and a high amount of precision then to these Rings could be bolted the heavy duty end hemispheres one of which featured an acrylic viewing port hole which was about seven inches thick now let's talk about possible points of failure for both designs naturally hatches and portholes might be seen as weak points but they actually aren't they use water pressure to their benefit Alvin has a single crew hatch on top of the pressure vessel you'd think that this might be a weak point but the water pressure acting on the submersible from the outside actually presses in on the hatch making the seal even more watertight the same is true of the portholes they're small round and extremely thick good at Distributing pressure and they're pressed in against the pressure vessel creating watertight seal remember when I mentioned that a sphere is adept at Distributing pressures there are no obvious places for pressure to build up right angles are the worst for this the infamous de Havilland Comet was a jet airliner that suffered a series of explosive decompressions because pressure built up in the corner of its Square Windows until the aircraft's skin now aircraft windows are rounded so that they evenly distribute the stress it's the same principle Titan had a couple of right angles most obviously at either end of the pressure vessel where the end domes met the Rings but remember the water pressure would be acting on these from the outside to make the seal even more watertight much has been made by the media about Stockton Rush Ocean Gate CEO talking about how the porthole would be quote squeezed in by the water but now you know he was probably referring to the pressure which was used to the submersible's benefit at depth to create even tighter seals instead areas of concern around Titan focus on the materials wound carbon fiber is not like titanium it's made up of layers of the material wound atop one another and essentially cue it into place after dozens of dive cycles and pressurizations and remember at this point the submersible is about five or six years old the fear is that the material might be susceptible to delamination where the individual layers May separate on top of that there are two points in Titan where different materials in the pressure vessel meet at either end where the carbon fiber Hull is bonded to the titanium rings The Guiding philosophy of submersible design is to avoid introducing potential points of failure especially on the pressure vessel where different materials meet but here Titan may have featured around two or three weaknesses relating purely to its material Construction this is why many in the Deep dive Community were questioning carbon fiber as a pressure Hull material it was simply experimental and under-evaluated Titan was the largest wound pressure vessel yet constructed and the first one to ever be employed to dive the Titanic so now with some understanding of the Titans construction and its potential weaknesses let's look at what we know has been found in the debris of the wreck so some of the first pieces of debris to be found were the exterior tail cone which is not part of the pressure vessel along with some of the steel framing for the landing skids but this was followed by the bow and Stern titanium hemispheres from the pressure vessel whether or not these are still connected to the titanium end Rings is yet to be seen But presumably fragments of the carbon fiber pressure Hull have also been found so that's a bit of a look at how Titan was built why some were concerned about its construction I want to avoid conjecture too much so I'm not going to go into where I think that you know the point of failure might have been that will be ascertained in time but that's a bit more of a detailed look at how this thing was actually built so we know how she was made and what's been found so far but now let's look at the incredible techniques and technologies that were actually used in the hunt to find the submersible essentially in a normal dive Titan and submersibles just like her would select a point that was far enough away from the Titanic wreck they weren't really at risk of dropping directly on top of it because that could be catastrophically bad obviously so they would descend in essentially a free fall at a rate of around about two to four kilometers per hour averaging about three and they would do so in in almost um a powered down state essentially the non-crucial electronic equipment is essentially on standby because you don't need power it's a two hour drop and the submarine is just essentially falling for for three or four kilometers so the crew turn off a lot of systems they don't need and kind of just hang out some fell asleep in previous Expeditions and then on approach to the seabed the submersible would begin to power up those crucial systems like like the engines and things like that so when reaching a sea floor they could come to a gentle rest thrusters are powered up and they can then start making their way towards the wreck of Titanic to have a look typically the bow is the most iconic it's the most easy rallying point for for easy navigation towards and in Titan's case the submersible actually relied on signals from the mothership to navigate which people again have made a lot of but it's um you know it's a different way of doing things the design Philosophy for this vessel was Simplicity why would you need to load a submersible up with you know a lot of navigational equipment when now we could rely on other communication systems to to essentially guide the submersible from the surface you know it's just a different design philosophy at a certain point and this is interesting um because it's kind of coming from people like uh Bob Ballard who found Titanic back in 85 James Cameron and people in the know there was a catastrophic implosion of the of the vessel when the hull was breached that that woven carbon fiber Hull obviously was breached at certain point and it seems that they were aware of the situation because the submersible had an acoustic system that was essentially designed to tell if the hull of the vessel was under stress from sounds it was making and would then essentially sound and alarm saying you've got a problem Bob Ballard James Cameron are indicating that the submersible dropped its ballast weight in an attempt to emergency surface but didn't make it and the hull was compromised and the vessel was destroyed because of it we know that now the Navy knew it then and I'll explain why in a minute but the information wasn't made publicly available until until just now obviously for for quite some time for the last few days the search was being treated as a search and rescue when people were fixated on the idea of you know there not being enough oxygen to support four or five days underwater so we understand what has happened to Titan with some degree of clarity and certainty what I really want to talk about is the technology and the techniques that they use to hunt for the submersible because it's it's really fascinating stuff and and um more in tune with what this channel is about which is how technology works so for the search teams involved they had a suite of Technologies at their hands at their disposals to to search for the for the missing submersible and these mainly relied on information about where the submersible was so the first piece of technology your eyes binoculars visual sighting on the surface the submersible was fitted with a number of fail-saves that in the event of a of an emergency she could emergency surface and then it would be a case of spotting visually the the submarine so you had um aircraft United States Coast Guard Canadian aircraft scouring the sea surface to visually make contact with with the submersible but also to employ Radar Now essentially radar is pretty common practice for identifying contacts or vehicles on the surface it relies on a transmitter that fires out radio beams into the atmosphere and then if those beams hit a solid object especially metal or things like that the beams have reflected off in all different directions and some bounce back at the uh the radar installation and from that you can essentially get a picture of if there is something out there it's called you can get a radar contact and it's especially useful for seeing big things like ships and and and you know large objects but Titan was a fairly small craft not too much bigger than a family car and sitting half submerged say bobbing on the surface a lot of her would be still in the water and it may not be a very easily distinguished radar contact now these are moot points now because we know the submarine was actually below the surface but there were aircraft and ships employing those kinds of visual and radar contact style strategies to locate the submarine on the surface but how do you search for a submersible underwater this is a really interesting bit of bit of history in engineering and Technology the primary tool for looking underwater is actually sound the sound travels very very far underwater and they actually knew this back in Titanic's day I made a video the other week talking about the navigational equipment on board Titanic and one of these was a very little known device called the submarine signaler and they're essentially two microphones placed in Titanic's Hull that could be used to listen for sounds underwater bells that were mounted to floating boys near Jagged shorelines or in fog that could essentially just be listened to like you were listening to a telephone and direct the ship away from that that danger and that Hazard navigating or searching for things with Acoustics is not new technology but it has been perfected sonar is the technology of choice for using sound underwater to find things there are two kinds two main kinds of Sona the first is passive sonar now this is essentially just listening to the sounds of the ocean for one of a better term listening in trying to hear things that a man made and distinguish between what could be a pot of whales and what could be say the propeller from a ship now we've all heard a lot about tapping sounds suppose the tapping sounds that were coming from the submersible were picked up or heard by by Navy vessels or Coast Guard vessels passive sonar would be the the technology that they would use essentially these are receivers that can detect sounds that simply travel through water a long distance there are two kinds of passive sonar there's wide band and narrow band and essentially wide band is like casting a wide net and getting a rough bearing on you hear a sound and that's kind of gives you maybe an idea of where something is and and in what direction roughly or if it's coming towards you or what have you narrow band is like taking a microscope to that sound splitting it apart and looking at all the different frequencies in that say recording of sound because boat propellers and dolphin pods and whales and and tectonic activity all these different things make sounds different frequencies and you can essentially split the sound apart and pick out okay that is a boat that is a whale we don't know what that is Canadian aircraft and search and rescue aircraft are flying around dropping Sono boys into the water that they can use to essentially listen for any sounds and of course one of the easy ways for a submarine or submersible crew who are trapped down below still alive in their craft without communication to the outside world to Signal where they are is to Simply rap on the side of the the hull of their submarine the sound will travel through the water and it will be heard the secret to this is not to constantly knock because that can get lost in this huge soundscape that is the ocean the ocean is very loud surprisingly loud not only that but Sono boys or passive sonar listeners from a distance are essentially listening to imagine if you were standing in a canyon yelling and that sound is traveling and traveling and traveling and becoming distorted and warped you need to listen very carefully to what is being said it helps if the message that is being sent is simple concise and easily determinable as to what it actually is so for that specific purpose submarine and submersible crews are trained to tap out around about three minutes every half an hour that kind of messaging from below is very clearly a deliberate attempt at making contact with the outside world it's it's regular it's at intervals that are perfectly timed and it will cut through the noise because it go it happens and then it stops as opposed to continual sound that could just get lost so that kind of tapping would be picked up by passive sonar there was obviously some news about this about supposed sounds um that does now seem to not have been the case but some of the crew on the submersible would have been trained in wrapping on the side of the hull to that kind of Rhythm to establish contact with the outside world and reach Sono boys or or passive sonar listeners disturbingly the United States Navy um heard the implosion of the submersible the day it went missing pretty much the minute that Communications with the outside world were actually lost and they immediately reported that to The Incident Commander the way they heard that is that the United States government actually has a quite secret installation of essentially a passive sonar listening devices all over the ocean there that are they were originally installed during the Cold War to listen for Soviet submarines they are fine-tuned and powerful enough that they can hear sounds like seismological activity undersea earthquakes they detected they heard with their passive sonar they actually heard the Titans implosion they knew about it and they told the incident controller and so search teams were able to use that information to essentially zero in on where Titan was finally we come to the second type of sonar we've looked at passive sonar the other type that could be used to locate a missing submarine or submersible is active sonar now I am sure that from movies or cartoons a lot of you would be familiar with this sound back in the day active sonar was used by destroyers to essentially see underwater and look out for enemy submarines and chase them down and Destroy them the way it works unlike with passive sonar passive sonar is essentially just listening to the ocean active sonar involves sending a signal out into the ocean and waiting for those those sound waves to bounce back and that feedback once they return to the the sonar installation can give you information on how far away the object is for example that the sound bounced off of what shape it is how big it is that kind of thing now this is called a sonar ping and it is essentially it's basic basic form a very very very loud sound that is made by the essentially like the transmitter will say of the active sonar installation that is just fired off underwater and this can really startle anything in its path especially animals and divers um this is an amazing piece of footage it's been very kindly provided by the diver Jim Ryan listen to this sonar ping from a nearby US Navy vessel while Jim was just diving and you'll see what I'm talking about it's that loud and you can kind of hear it pinging off into the distance and echoing as it goes through the ocean it's a good demonstration of how sound itself just travels underwater active sonar is a lot more advanced than it was back in the day during World War II when submarine sonar and Destroyer sonar sounded like this a single note single frequency that can give you very very limited information and now they sound like this multiple tones multiple frequencies and dozens of pings per second even that can be used to map very complex image of what objects are below a ship so complex modern active sonar can be used to literally create a visual map of an environment this is called sonar Imaging and ironically it's been used to great effect to map the Titanic wreck site in Exquisite detail active sonar could be used to find say a vehicle like Titan resting on the on the sea floor it would appear as a as a blip not a very big blip but it would appear as a visual blip modern computers can take the active sonar's data and turn it into a visual visual map and and show you a 3D model essentially or a 3D scan of what is down there modern side scanning sonar would be able to map the sea floor and potentially find an object the size of Titan Titan's not very big but in theory active sonar could have spotted Titan on the sea floor now some of the issues surrounding this are actually to do with Titanic herself the Titanic wreck is not in one piece the ship very famously when she sank broke apart at the surface spilling hundreds and thousands of objects and pieces of wreckage all over the sea floor were a submersible like Titan to come to rest in the debris field um a active sonar scan of the debris field wouldn't reveal it but then it would be essentially like playing a game Spot the Difference with an older scan of the rig of the debris field to see what new specs about the size of Titan had appeared the even worst case scenario and uh I'll be honest this I kind of thought this might have been the reality of the situation earlier this week is that there are pieces of Titanic down there that are monumental here is my drawing of the Titanic's wreck as it would have appeared the morning after the sinking but to give you an idea of the size that's the Titanic's bow section and here is the Titan to scale as you can see pretty significant size difference so there are pieces of Titanic down there that Tower over Titan there are three story tall chunks of Titanic superstructure just jutting out of the silt there are hundreds and hundreds of pieces bigger than Titan that could shroud it they could hide the submersible's hull from an active sonar scan and they would never see it were the submersible to land in an empty area relatively empty area it would be easier to to find or to land in a debris field it may be impossible to locate and I genuinely thought that the submersible may never be seen again I don't say any of this to be dramatic we know now like I said earlier what happened through the submersible but I just wanted to give you a bit of an insight into these techniques and technologies that were used to locate the wreck in the end now we have a much clearer understanding of what happened that the the hull failed and the submarine was was destroyed so the wreckage has been located but truthfully at the time of writing this this script uh the submersible was nowhere to be found and I genuinely thought that it might hide somewhere down there in the in the sonar shadow of a much bigger object but yeah I hope this has been interesting I didn't feel comfortable making a video until we you know had a bit more certainty over what is happening but hopefully this will help you kind of cut through the noise of some of the words that were being thrown around this week you should have a decent understanding now of radar sonar the two types of sonar and how they were used interchangeably and together to to try to search for the submersible Titan when it was missing I hope this video was interesting or uh informative at the very least let me know what you thought um down in the comments as always hopefully next week we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming but until then as always stay safe and stay happy and I'll see you again next time

Channel: Oceanliner Designs

Views: 1,293,053

Keywords: great ocean liners, maritime history, ocean liners, famous oceanliners, ships documentary, history of ships, engineering, history, ships, documentary, origins explained, world history project, animated history, open educational resources, titanic, shipwreck, sinking, boats, ocean, disaster, tragedy

Id: 4O5F4ZVlIac

Length: 34min 7sec (2047 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 24 2023