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Interesting Bill! Very
interesting!
I must admit, designing a bottom hatch for divers
exit never came to my mind when building my sub. As far as doing this on a
Kittredge design sub, it would require quite a bit of modification.
There is only about 12 inches between the battery pods and in that space already
there is a variable ballast tank and two long slender drop weights. I'm
sure it can be done my moving things around some though. You can add a few
extra pounds of weight, maybe a 200, to the design as still have enough
buoyancy. Right now I carry, me at 160 pounds and an additional 395 pounds
of removable lead.
I think the biggest draw back to this idea is the
amount of air you would need to carry on board to pressurize the whole hull to
reach ambient. In shallower water not a problem. Also, and I'm not a
diver so I'm not familiar with the details but, wouldn't you need to spend quite
a bit more time in the sub after you did your thing to depressurize which would
make a scrubber and oxygen system a necessity. I guess if some small subs
have diver lockouts they must have scrubbers and do the time required inside the
hull afterward.
BTW, Sorry Bill, if I got you in the position of
being perceived as anti Scuttle valve. That thread has floated around here
before with some opposition to it's value in a sub.
Keep thinking, your an asset,
Dan H.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 5:49
AM
Subject: Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Converting
from 1 atmosphere to ambient for escape?
I forgot to mention. If you have the room
for a diver lockout CHAMBER, you also have a built in flood/scuttle
valve. If you left the diver lockout chamber door open to the hull and flooded
the chamber, you flood the hull.
The above is assuming you DON'T have a
chamber door safety switch which made sure the chamber door was
fully closed and latched before the flood valve
could work, or you disable said switch.
You can also make a small 1 atmosphere sub have a
diver lockout (without a chamber) by pressurizing the interior to equal
the outside pressure and opening a lower hatch to escape as in an ambient sub.
Therebye changing your small 1 atmosphere sub
into an ambient sub for either diveing purposes or escape.
If you used this for diving purposes you could
reenter the sub, close the lower hatch, then let off interior air pressure and
change it back to a 1 atmosphere sub.
Small size interior space does not
necessarily preclude a diver lockout. Just become ambient.
I wonder if anyone has built a 1 atmosphere sub
that converted to ambient and back again? The neat thing for diving with
it would be you could start offgassing the nitrogen from your body as soon as
you converted the sub to 1 atmosphere again
so you could stay underwater in the 1 atmosphere
sub and offgas, then convert the sub to ambient and go out again. I wonder how
hard it would be to install an internal bottom hatch on the Kitteridge
350 and pressurize it to ambient and back to 1 atmosphere again?
Just more alternatives. I
like this forum as a sounding board for raw sub ideas that we can tweak
into workable ones. Some sub ideas might need refinement, more
discussion, or wise deletion, but none are stupid.
Kindest Regards,
Bill Akins.
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