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21.06.2021 19:42:12
WARNING: We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.
See full version: A DIY Submarine That Can Dive 30 Feet
WARNING: We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.
4. Air
A compressor stuffed into the back of the sub pumps the ballast tanks full of air. If the fans that circulate air from the surface fail, Beckerman can also use the compressor as a makeshift snorkel. [links]
5. Controls
Three voltmeter readouts [red numbers] keep tabs on the sub’s electrical systems. Beckerman can also see the lake bed on an old DVD-player screen, which is connected to a tiny video camera on the vessel’s bow. [links]
The 18-year-old’s love of building took off at age two, when his dad started taking him to a junkyard to hunt for old computers, printers, and motors. The junkyard manager got to know Beckerman and his dad and saved his best components for them. Friends, family, and even random strangers helped by dropping off parts at their house. Over the years, Beckerman learned to transform these scraps into miniature hovercrafts, imitation Mars rovers, a wind turbine, and other complex machines. Instead of trying to perfect something the first time, he constructs multiple versions. “I learn from my experiments,” he says.
Nautilus, as Beckerman calls it, isn’t his first manned submarine. Version 1.0 felt too cramped, and he wanted to add room and range—to that end, he convinced his parents to buy an eight-foot-long, two-foot-wide section of a corrugated plastic drainage pipe.
3. Illumination
Five different clusters of super-bright LEDs, including this cluster of four lights on the stern of the sub, help illuminate the lake’s murky waters on deeper dives. [links]
Wings, aelerons, and tails work underwater too. Deep Flight is a commercial submarine developed by Gram Hawkes that takes advantage of this in order to give the submarine airplane like qualities. Deep Flight is positive buoyant and only stays underwater as long as it stays moving. If slows down too much is stalls and rises uncontrolled to the surface, just like like an airplane. See more at www.deepflight.com
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Diver Propulsion Vehicle or DPV
Not being completely wet has its advantages. Sitting in a semi dry sub your out of the water from about your chest on up, about like sitting in a hot tub. The top of the sub traps a pocket of air that allows the occupants to breath, talk, and view thought the windows without wearing any scuba gear. Because air is compressed as the sub descends and because the occupants need to breath, fresh air from scuba tanks is constantly feed into the compartment at about 4 cubic feet per minute. The excess air simply leaks out of a hole so the water maintains a constant depth inside the sub. Since the top of the sub must be air tight you enter most semi dry subs, like the Resort Sub show here, by swimming up into the cabin. The sub simply has an opening underneath, no hatch is needed. Like wet subs, semi dry subs maintain their depth by balancing the amount of air in there ballast tanks against the amount of weight from lead and batteries. It is important for semi dry subs to be maintain a constant volume of air in order to not upset their buoyancy. The Resort Sub shown is equipped with vertical thrusters on each side. These allow it to maintain control of the depth without constant adjustments to the ballast tanks. It is very important to understand that even though the occupants are not breathing thought a scuba regulator, they are still breathing compressed air, nitrogen is still building up in their bodies, and a sudden accent is very dangerous. So all of the rules an precautions for scuba divers also apply to semi-dry sub occupants. The Resort Sub is manufactured by International VentureCraft Corp, and they provide a wealth of information on their web site: www.ivccorp.com and will be glad to sell you one for only $44,000
Dry ambient subs are just a simple step up from semi-dry subs. Ambient means that the occupants are exposed to the pressure of the water surrounding the sub. They ride in an air bubble, and like all air bubbles it want to rise to the surface. The larger the amount of air then the larger the upward force. That force is equal to the weight of the water that fill the space where the air is. When you think about building a dry ambient submarine, it's a lot like thinking of building an aquarium. A 100 gallon aquarium weights about 820 pounds. That's a lot of weight pushing down on the bottom, so it must be built strong. If you took the same 100 gallon aquarium and put it upside down in a swimming pool then filled it with air, it would be the same. 820 pounds of water wants to fill the aquarium and push the air out, so the air is pushing on what is normally the bottom of the aquarium with 820 pounds of force. And your going to need 820 pounds to hold that aquarium down. For the crew inside a dry ambient is breathing air that is under pressure so to the crew it's still just like scuba diving but they are are warm and dry. Herve Jaubert designed and built a complete line of dry ambient subs like the Explorer pictured here
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The Navy SEALS are the ideal candidates for a go-fast small submarine, and they have a diesel powered SPWS (surface planing wet sub) built for them by STIDD Systems. A wet sub does not have the ballast weight of a 1 ATM so the the available HP translates into more speed and range. The SPWS design criteria called for the ability to carry a six-man team and 1,830 pounds of gear up to 165 nautical miles away on the surface or 18 nautical miles under the surface. Surface speed is to be around 30 knots and submerged speeds are thought to be around 6 knots.
In 1994 Wilfried Ellmer built a 20 ton, 9 m long 2.5 meter diameter concrete sub with an 18cm wall thickness in the form of a blimp. The photo show the sub being launched into lake Atter in Austria. Concrete is actually a great material submarines as you need a lot of ballast for a 1 ATM hull, and the compression force applied by water is exactly the thing that concrete does best. So if you are in the market for a big, low cost hull, Wilfrend will be glad to hear from you. See more at www.concretesubmarine.com
Well, maybe eventually. Meanwhile, it's a perfect day in Southern California, all azure skies and crystalline sunshine, and a small crowd has gathered on the dock here in Huntington Beach to watch us slowly sink below the surface.
Indeed, some industry insiders are raising warning flags about the idea of selling subs for leisure. "They're marketed as toys," says Richard Boggs, technical superintendent at the yacht management firm Camper & Nicholsons International. "But a submarine is no more a toy than a helicopter is. They're very complex machines, and they require a high degree of technical competence and training to operate safely." Boggs has been working with submarine manufacturers and yacht managers to establish industrywide guidelines modeled after the ones used by commercial sub operators.
The technical challenges are formidable. Given the corrosive effects of seawater, the incredible pressures that build with depth, and the inherent danger, submarines are very difficult to operate safely and cheaply. Critical systems must be redundant, and structural components have to be engineered to withstand loads many times greater than those likely to be encountered. Add it all up, and submarines are heavy, complicated and expensive. more
A while back I was looking around on the internet and saw someone's home built ROV. I thought to myself that I could never build that. 3 weeks later, I had built a fully functional ROV. An ROV is a Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicle, and I have built mine to explore an old town under my lake. The ROV costs roughly about $150, depending on what materials you want. I still have to work out some bugs on the tether and I still have to finish the camera setup. It has taken Longer than I expected to finish the camera stuff. Check out the most recent video of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRWh7HqtBPA . Sadly, I didn't document the process until later in the project.
This is a more complicated part. To begin, you have to create a controller. I made mine out of balsa wood and I put duct tape around it so that it would feel much better when you are holding it. You will want to measure out a square of balsa wood that will fit in your hand, then drill holes big enough to house the three switches. Next, glue them into place, then start wiring. When you are wiring, make sure that you solder each wire correctly. Once you have completed that, start connecting the motor wire to the tether wires. Each tether wires should at least be 75 feet long, but 100 feet is best. Finally, wire the battery boxes to the DPDT switches and add the batteries. Make sure that all of the motors run the right way you want them to.
This is probably the most important step of all. You have to glue every part together several times to make sure that they don't come a part when it is under water. To start, you will want to take your saw and cut 14 sections of 12 inch sections. Then you will want to cut 4 three inch sections. Then start building the front and make your way back. (Use picture for reference). One thing that is not in the picture is the middle bar for the up and down motor. That was added later. It is a 12 inch long section hot glued onto the top of it in the middle. Also, take your drill and drill a couple of holes for water to flow out of the PVC. more