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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

There is a relative recent trend by fire fighters to replace old steel/aluminum cylinders with breathing gas to cylinders made out of carbon (300 bar). They are also used under water in diving.

The intend benefit is the reduced weight, but I wonder a bit how the failure mode might be a bit different from steel.

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People deal with potential gas cylinder failure by occasionally testing them at higher than their usual pressure. You fill them with water and pressure to say 350 bar rather than 300. At least that's what they do with scuba tanks. Even if designed well they can be dropped, corroded etc.

Not sure it's practical to do that with subs.

Yes, that is what they do with steel and aluminum cylinders. After over pressuring them you measure how much the metal flex, and that way you get an indication of how much fatigue and thus risk there is with that cylinders.

I am unsure if they do that with carbon versions. Do they flex with over pressuring, and is that flexing indicative to failure? If they do fail, is it like an explosion where the whole thing just unwrap, or is it more like a leak?

Everest oxygen cylinders, made of titanium and kevlar usually sometimes get dropped off a cliff by accident, hit a rock and explode. Apparently they go off with quite a bang.

I'm not sure how they do routine testing.

The advantage of testing pressure vessels with water is that the failure mode is usually less bad than gas (because it doesn't expand through any breach like gas does).

Unfortunately a sub is the opposite of a pressure tank (the pressure is on the outside) so you need a pressure bottle bigger than the sub to test it in. I don't think these are common or easy to come by.

I've been in the reverse, an autoclave large enough to hold an entire spacecraft. That was already engineering on a scale that defied my imagination considerably, doing the same at the level where an entire sub could be pressurized to 400 atmospheres is engineering on a different plane. I don't think you could do this any cheaper/easier than just strapping it to a tether and dropping it overboard in a very deep part of the ocean, then winch it back in to see if it survived.

Gosh, that's one big autoclave. As you say, a sub tank would be even more of a monster bit of engineering. They do exist for more normal depths but I'm not sure if there are civilian / rentable sub test tanks for this kind of ultra deep stuff.

I guess in practice for something like the titanic sub, you could program it somehow to dive unmanned to some depth deeper than normal use and then resurface. Presumably with some radio beacon so you can find it when it does. Or a long cable connected to monitoring devices. If it didn't come back you'd have lost a sub but not lives.

I'm not even sure they exist at all for that depth.

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