Titanic article
Titanic article
(OP)
I apologize if this is posted in the wrong forum. I considered the ocean engineering one, but this one has more readers I think and this is a materials issue too.
http: //www.usne ws.com/art icles/news /national/ 2008/09/25 /the-secre t-of-how-t he-titanic -sunk.html
I wonder if they have considered how the salt water itself has affected the microstructure of the rivets and the steel plates. Perhaps, though, at that depth, there is so little oxygen and it's so cold that metal is extraordinarily well preserved so that this isn't an issue?
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I wonder if they have considered how the salt water itself has affected the microstructure of the rivets and the steel plates. Perhaps, though, at that depth, there is so little oxygen and it's so cold that metal is extraordinarily well preserved so that this isn't an issue?





RE: Titanic article
The salt water itself will have no affect on the metallurgical properties of the steel hull or rivets. This happens during heat treatment and/or forming operations during fabrication of the ship.
Marine organisms in this part of the Atlantic ocean are slowly consuming the steel ship structure. There is concern that over the next 25-50 years there will be no steel structure left to view.
RE: Titanic article
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RE: Titanic article
There have been several white papers on TV about the two theories concerning the manner of its sinking.
There was program just on TV about Ballard finding the Titanic. He was in the Navy at the time and was on a secret mission to find the sunken nuclear submarines Thresher and Scorpion. He locaed both subs and while investigating the wrecks he discovered that both wrecks left a long debris field that would lead him to the vessel itself. He used this knowledge to locate the Titanic. Instead of looking for the vessel itself he found the debris field and followed it to the vessel itself.
RE: Titanic article
RE: Titanic article
I understood your question the first time, and the answer is still NO.
RE: Titanic article
RE: Titanic article
There are several developing theories about the sinking. The main one is that the stern never rose more than 10-15 degrees before the ship broke in half.
Even though the boards of inquiry found nothing wrong with the design it is interesting that both of Titanic's sister ships were modified after the Titanic sunk.
RMS Olympic
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RMS Britannic
http://phi
RE: Titanic article
I followed your link on the Olympic. I am impressed at the number of things Olympic managed to collide with. In spite of all this, Olympic does not seem to have had any structural problems during its career. I am aware of few structural problems with ships built circa 1912. The marine architects back then understood their materials, and the loads they were subjected to. If you inflect enough damage on any structure, it will fail.
There was a public outcry about Titanic's watertight bulkheads and double hull. Titanic's hull conformed to the codes of the day, and for all I know, it might conform to today's codes.
Titanic grazed the iceberg for something like 300 feet along her side, ripping a hole that was estimated to have an area of 12ft2. Would better quality rivets or less brittle steel have been enough to have prevented this?
The Mauretania was built from the ground up to be a Blue Riband capturing hot rod. On her maiden voyage, she failed to take it because she slowed for fog (and storms).
Moral of story: don't smash into stuff.*
JHG
* Except for hostile U boats! :)
RE: Titanic article
Regards,
Cory
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RE: Titanic article
Anecdotal:
When I was in the Army we were on a very large troop transport going to Japan by way of Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea. The ship, MSTS General Gaffey, was a twin stacker large enough to carry 10,000 troops. One our trip we had a total 1500 dependents and military personal. When we we going to Inchon, Korea we had to wait for high tide to cross the bar due to the draft of the ship. I had a job in the galley as coffee maker for the chief of the boat, kept me out of hasty details. It was very still and with a lot of heavy fog. In the galley we had opened about 5 port holes to air the place out since we had been in bad weather for several days. At high tide we made the dash for the harbor at nearly full speed. The ship was shaking quite a bit as the propellers were close to the bottom. As we sat drinking coffee and playing cards we were rudly interrupted by the collision with an LST anchored in the channel. As the ship stated to heel to starboard water started coming in the open portholes. As we attempted to get the portholes closed the collision alarm was going off and you could hear the water tight doors closing along with the metal of the two vesels screaming, the only way to describe it. The galley was on deck five and one had to go up three decks up to have access to main deck, where the life boats were. We were essentially trapped in the galley until the water tight doodrs opened. Fortunately the ship returned to an even keel and all horns stopped. Our ship's only damage was a bent propeller blade. We had to run at half speed or less until we could get to Japan. We made it to Yokohama with only one small incident, we hit and sank a coal barge in the middle of Tokyo Bay. Needless to say Radar on this type ship wasn't very good.
The MSTS General Gaffey
http://www.msts-history.org/gaffey.html
RE: Titanic article
Marine regulations of time stated that a ship should survive having any two adjacent holds opened up, and it should survive having the first four holds opened up. Titanic was built to this requirement.
Titanic's first six holds were flooded. Extending bulkheads all the way to the deck, allowed Olympic and Britannic to grossly exceed the current standards, and would would have allowed Titanic to survive its collision with the iceburg. Extending bulkheads is a technical detail. The real question is one of performance. How many holds can be flooded on a modern liner without it sinking?
JHG
RE: Titanic article
Titanic's hull was assembled with round headed rivets. In the accident, she scraped the side of the iceberg. This would have imposed a huge shear load on the heads of the rivets. The entire kinetic energy of the ship would be applied to only a few rivets at any time during contact with the iceberg. Obviously, the ice would give way too, but it appears to me that a flush riveted ship (were there any?) might have survived the accident. A ship welded to post WWII standards, might have survived too.
Is this even a design issue in the selection of rivets?
Perhaps the correct way to look at this would be to define some material, Prostium, or Drawohium, that would have remained intact during the impact with the iceberg. What would its yield stress and elastic module be? Was such a material available at the time?
JHG
RE: Titanic article
Metallurgy of the RMS Titanic
http://
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Corrosion Prevention & Corrosion Control