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Greetings Mates,Greetings Mates, A good friend of mine used to work for Schilling Robotics as lead designer and assembly manager of the Quest WROV unit. I was asking him questions about it's systems and syntactic foam parts and learn some important things. The early prototypes of the Quest WROV used fiberglass covered syntactic foam that was rigidly bolted to the ROV's framework. This turned out to be bad for very deep dives, since the syntactic foam, fiberglass, and frame expanded and contracted at different rates under great pressure and cold. Mostly resulting in the fiberglass cracking and separating from the syntactic foam and stress on the bolted contact points. So for later models they no longer used fiberglass over the syntactic foam, but just a thick layer of gel coat or other more elastic coating. Then the syntactic foam was attached to the framework with urethane mounts, that are allot like motor mounts, to allow flexing between the different materials in the assembly. Now keep in mind this was for a ROV rated for 3000 MSW and for some models 6500 MSW. In the pictures in the link below you will also see that the Quest WROV has electric ring thrusters on it. My friend also was a large part of the ring thrusters design as well. An interesting note is that there was a special ring thruster motor that served as the hydraulic pump for the ROV's systems, like the manipulator arms, because of the great efficiency of that motors design. Now that Schilling Robotics is no longer merged with Sub-Atlantic, perhaps they will now bring back the ring thruster as apart of there product line. http://questrov.com/ I'm interested to know how well Karl Stanley's sub Idabel has held up in regards to it's syntactic foam being covered in fiberglass and being attached directly to a steel hull that regularly goes down to 2000 FSW. Regards,
Brent Hartwig |