There are a number of reasons why it might have failed, fatigue, deviation from process/protocol but pressure vessels are well understood and not the problem here.
Are carbon-fiber pressure vessels well understood?
I get that there's a lot of armchair quarterbacking from internet material experts here, but this does seem to be an outlier with this particular submarine.
They're well-understood to not be what you want to build a high-pressure submarine out of.
They can take the pressure. But they're incredibly expensive to check for defects, and the result of a defect is "sub-second catastrophic failure" instead of any warning of imminent structural degradation.
The issue seems to be hull integrity, namely being able to inspect the hull before it's failing in order to detect issues without risking anyone's life. The only thing they could do with a carbon fiber hill is use an acoustic hull monitoring that only told you that the hull was in the process of failing - so potentially getting no real warning at all. It does you no good finding out your hull is going to implode in 10 seconds when it will take you an hour to get to safety. This is what the ex-OG employee got fired over because he made a stink about how the carbon fiber hull was unsafe for this reason.
vkou|2 years ago
I get that there's a lot of armchair quarterbacking from internet material experts here, but this does seem to be an outlier with this particular submarine.
shadowgovt|2 years ago
They can take the pressure. But they're incredibly expensive to check for defects, and the result of a defect is "sub-second catastrophic failure" instead of any warning of imminent structural degradation.
PepperdineG|2 years ago
aflag|2 years ago
slowmovintarget|2 years ago