[Date Prev][Date Next]
[Chronological]
[Thread]
[Top]
Battery boxes
This is exactly my current working design. I use a hard external
battery box and purge with nitrogen, which is cheap and non-flammable. I
sized around 6V conventional lead-acid's, but may actually deploy with AGM.
My hope was that someone else would use them first and give me some idea if
they are worth the cost premium for that sexy discharge curve :) This
external hard battery box is also used in the K-series of boats, usually
with lead-acids armed with Hydrocaps if memory serves.
Unless you are diving truly deep (i.e. > hundreds of meters), my
reading of Busby among others was that the weight penalty is not worth the
hassle. The trade-off is complexity of the system versus the mass of the
battery box, and for most of us a hard battery box is probably the way to
go, as opposed to a complicated pressure-compensation system with all the
bellows, oil lines and seals involved. Depending on how important you feel
avoiding a hydrogen explosion is, you could even put the batteries in a
regular case in the sub at 1atm, seal the box well and purge that. This is
probably the simplest system I could concieve of, save the rack of plain
cells under the seat.
Guess I just understand too much chemistry to put caustic and
explosive gasses in my immediate breathing space. :)
John
John Brownlee
Lunar and Planetary Lab
University of Arizona
jonnie @ lpl . arizona . edu