How fast did the people in it die?
Of course once the sub filled with water they would die instantly because it would reach insane pressures (300-400 ATM or 5800 PSI)
Less than 4 milliseconds. They didn’t feel a thing.
Do you think they died from the water rushing in and hitting them unconscious?
They died by being crushed with enough pressure such that the air inside the sub ignited ie compressed so much it essentially exploded. Death was instant.
I know a diesel engine works off compression, but it has a fuel. All fires must have oxygen, fuel, and heat. What fuel would they have in the titan to ignite?
“Rushing” implies something like a wave. The thing crushed flat like the plastic tube it was, and would have done so too fast to even visually track.
If you were to slowly lower an open glass into the ocean, it would gradually fill with water. So i just think its the same with the sub, albeit faster?
Physics and math. J/k. I’ve seen similar numbers thrown about. Here is a link to a Quora question What happens to the human body when a submarine implodes from 2 years ago that may be of interest.
When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour - that’s 2,200 feet per second. A modern nuclear submarine’s hull radius is about 20 feet. So the time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond.
A human brain responds instinctually to stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response (sense→reason→act) is at best 150 milliseconds.
The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors. When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine. The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion. Large blobs of fat (that would be humans) incinerate and are turned to ash and dust quicker than you can blink your eye.
To add context here, it takes your brain somewhere around 100ms to detect and then another 250 to process pain. So 4ms is not only fast, it’s absurdly fast.
To get a sense of how fast it is, go ahead and stub your toe, the time it took to feel it is 100 times longer.
I just take solace in the fact that they probably just snapped out of existence instead of having to slowly die in a dark tube over a few days.
And because what failed was the carbon fibre composite pressure vessel, it probably didn’t even give any warnings to make them worried. It would be like squeezing a glass bottle, everything will be perfectly fine until it just instantly shatters.
I don’t think anyone has any real data on the failure point, which is the needed info to know how long it would take to die. There has been lots of speculation that the carbon fiber used (rejected by Boeing as being out-of-spec) or the use of dissimilar materials each with different thermal expansion and contraction coefficients, to the “bubble window” being way under spec because the CEO didn’t want to pay for a proper spec one.
Without those we don’t know exactly how fast. We don’t know if they passengers had any indication of a problem (sounds?) or if it started leaking before it imploded or if it was an instant catastrophic failure.
I believe they have found parts of the wreckage. I wonder if we will get any clues to how it happened. I guess either way they wouldn’t have survived long
The primary cause I’m hearing is the window. It was rated for a dive depth of 1500m, and the sub would routinely dive to 4000m.
I really don’t get this. The CEO knows that the window is so seriously under-speced, yet he still doesn’t hesitate to jump into the sub himself.
Specs aren’t a universal constant. They’re defined by humans. Expert humans, but humans. He must have thought he knew better than the experts. He was wrong, but I don’t think the lesson had time to sink in.
He may have thought along these lines… So the window is rated for 1500m interesting usually engineers use a 3x safety factor when they rate something that’d be…(sound of slowly grinding gears) 4500m! But I’m only going about 4000m meters down?
Jackpot! I’m not going to waste my time certifying the window to some silly extra strong standard! Take that you nerds!
There’s no such thing as a slow implosion death. That’s just called being crushed. It’s sorta like how you can’t have a slow explosion death, but even less likely because in an explosion you can be thrown clear with slowly fatal injuries
I can’t find where I saw it, but the friction of the water as it poured into the submarine at those depths would have been so strong that it would have heated the internal components hotter than the surface of the sun. Supposedly they cooked to death before they were crushed. But damn I can’t find the link anymore, lol. Someone with better google-fu please link to the article
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8tW4zfTeJqM&feature=sharea
On the topic— interesting slowmo of a miniature titanium sub imploding. Its hard to even imagine the forces a sub can go through.
