It’s hard to believe that almost a year has passed since then OceanGate’s Titan submersible has disappeared. Surely that happened at least three years ago, right? Experts discovered this after several days of searching The submarine most likely imploded, killing everyone on board. debris and Possible human remains were eventually recovered, but that’s about it for the Titan submersible. However, thanks to new research, we may finally have a better idea of what exactly went wrong. Or rather, new research appears to confirm what we knew all along – the submarine was essentially designed to fail from the start.
As The Independent reportsResearchers at the University of Houston and the University of Minnesota tried to create a computer model to predict when small defects would cause different materials to bend, and recently published an article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. And while the paper didn’t focus specifically on the Titan submersible, its lead author Roberto Ballarini didn’t shy away from talking about how what they learned highlighted how poor the Titan’s design really was, saying:
The material used for the Titan’s hull was a carbon fiber composite. It is known that the fibers in such composites are susceptible to micro-buckling under compressive loading.
If Titan’s hull had suffered such damage under the extreme pressures experienced during its dives, its rigidity and strength would have been significantly reduced. Along with the inevitable geometric imperfections that arise during manufacturing, [that] may have contributed to its kink-related implosion.
So yeah, it turns out building a submersible out of carbon fiber was a bad idea after all. Unfortunately, Stockton Rush, the founder of OceanGate and the man who ultimately called the shots and is responsible for the deaths of everyone on board, is no longer here to answer for endangering their lives in this way. And it’s not like he didn’t know he was taking unnecessary risks. Rush previously said: “At some point, security becomes a waste,” And even pointed out known problems to a YouTuber.
He ended up ignoring established technology and safety standards just to be different and save a little money, and paid the ultimate price for it. It’s just a shame he wasn’t the only one down there when the sub imploded. The others who died didn’t deserve what he did to them.
This article originally appeared on Jalopnik.