Thaindian News

Washington, Apr 27 (ANI): A submarine team in the US has revealed that they have developed a new glass design that can withstand intense pressure at the bottom of the ocean.

Conditions at the deepest point of the ocean, 36,000 feet down in the Pacific’s Mariana Trench, are so intense that the only manned submersible to make it there was the Trieste bathyscaphe, and that was in 1960.

Triton Submarines CEO Bruce Jones, and his team have just announced that they’ve developed new technology for a submersible to take humans 36,000 feet below the ocean’s surface to the deepest of the deep.

“This is a real commercial, scientific work vehicle that we expect to get a lot of use,” Discovery News quoted Jones, who has been in the submarine business for 20 years, as saying.

“It’s not, ‘Let’s go to the bottom of the ocean one time and then give it to a museum to put on a shelf’,” he said.

The design for the new vessel, called the Triton 36,000, will be based on the Triton series of submersibles made by Triton Submarines, a subsidiary of U.S. Submarines.

Instead of using acrylic for the passenger compartment, they plan to use thick common glass shaped into a sphere.

They will use a newly developed technique created by San Diego-based Rayotek Scientific, a glassmaker whose long client list includes Boeing, DuPont, 3M and NASA.

Borosilicate glass, also known as soda-lime glass, has advantages over synthetics.

“Glass under compression gets stronger. You can hire some giant squid to come over with a sledgehammer and just start bashing away on that glass sphere. And it won’t hurt it,” Rayotek CEO Bill Raggio said.

Materials expand and contract at different rates, so metal and glass joined together can create structural problems in the deep.

To avoid that, Rayotek came up with a novel and proprietary technique to turn the glass into a sphere. Raggio said they’re working on patenting it and can’t share the details.

“The whole concept is very simple. When you read the patent, you’re going to think, ‘Oh man, why didn’t I think of that?’” Raggio said.

The plan for the Triton 36,000 is to seat three people — a pilot and two passengers. The hemispheres of the pressure hull will have a seal that can be removed for entering and exiting.

Once people are inside, the sphere is resealed similar to the way a fighter pilot is protected by a dome that comes down over the cockpit.

“They call it the pressure boundary. It’s the boundary between you and instant death,” Raggio explained. (ANI)