Acrylic viewing dome

[Dave Everett <deverett@idx.com.au>]

Hello all,

I'm looking at building a small psub and would like to use an acrylic dome
as my viewport.

I'm currently having a dome made that I will be testing in the following way:

I plan to seal the dome to a flat steel plate, inside the dome will be a
pressure transducer and on the outside of the plate another transducer. The
whole thing will be on a rope and should be pulled down by the weight of
the steel plate.

I will log the data about 20 times a second, and expect the pressure inside
the dome to remain about 1atm. Of course eventually the dome will crush and
by graphing the 2 sensors I should be able to get a good idea of the
absolute limit of the dome.

The dome is 700mm in diameter and 12mm thick (due to the manufacturing
process it is only about 6mm at the top)

I would be interested in comments about the testing procedure and
availability of electronic pressure sensors that would be suitable for the
external pressure measurements.

Depending on the results I may repeat the experiment with a 20mm thick dome.

Dave Everett.