I had a short week with the holiday. This meant I wasn’t gonna start any big projects this week but I do have some to finish up in the next two weeks before my internship ends. This week I spent a lot of time cleaning and organizing the electrical shop. It hasn’t been organized in a long time and when everything was moved off the ship stuff was kinda just shoved into places. I’ve been working to get everything organized before the winter holidays because when everyone comes back in January it’s gonna be crunch time. It’s really funny (in a not funny way) how messy some of the drawers can be and you can pull out something that hasn’t been used on the sub in some 20 years. Yet some things are older than I am and still heavily used.
Month: November 2020
I installed another chassis this week. This one took a little more effort since I had to make a new ground wire for it. Similar to houses having ground wires (wires that literally are connected to the ground, buried deep) many parts of the sub are grounded to the surrounding environment (seawater). This is important to protect the electronics in case of circuit overload.
I also set up and installed the new video hub for inside the sphere. The video hub takes all of the camera inputs, and directs their output to various pilot or observer monitors. It can be a simple one input to one output, or one input can output to multiple screens. The difference with the new one is that the connections can be changed from the hub itself as well as from the computer. I was able to boot up the old hub, save the settings, connect the new hub, find out the settings can’t be transferred between two different models, type in the settings, type in the settings again because the hub went through a firmware update and didn’t save the settings, and install the hub into the mock sphere. It’s pretty tight with the spacing up at the top but hopefully there won’t be too much wire switching in the sphere.
New video hub!
Since some of the pressure housings have been pressure tested, I’ve been working on reinstalling the chassises that hold all the electronics. It’s better to pressure test the housings without the electronics just in case there is a leak but this means I have to wait for the pressure tests to finish before I can work on the chassises. This kinda bottlenecks my workflow, but this week I was able to reinstall 2 chassises. I took them apart 3 months ago but I still remember how the process went. It’s actually easier to put everything back together; when I took them apart, the wires did not want to come out of the chassis, but threading them back in is going smoothly. One thing I don’t like dealing with is thermal paste. When the electronics are running, they generate a lot of heat. To deal with this, there are heat pipes running through the chassis that connect to cool plugs outside the housing. This helps conduct heat away from the electronics where it can dissipate in the cold sea water. However, the heat pipes need to be coated in thermal paste to help with this process. Thermal paste is a thick sticky goo that is very difficult to wash off once it’s one. Yet it manages to get everywhere. Working on the wires and end caps around the thermal paste means my arms are covered in it.
The chassis mounted on the end cap. In the front are the wires that are connected to the end cap. They are threaded in the center of the chassis and connect in the middle of the right half of the chassis.
Caught in a moment of victory! A screw had fallen into the chassis and I had to fish it out. Anything dropped in must be recovered in order to prevent any shorts.
More end cap assembly this week. It started with taking locking collars off the old connectors so they could be put on the new connectors. It’s a bit of work to pull out a metal retaining ring that’s resting in a groove inside the plastic collar with the connector leaving very little room. Though taking the locking collars off is way easier than putting them on; trying to shove the metal ring back into its groove in a space too small for my finger to fit is a great way to make your finger sore. It’s like when you’re just learning how to play a stringed instrument and you haven’t built up any calluses yet. Except instead of strings they’re metal rings. I’ve now finished assembling most of the end caps. In order to finish the rest, I’m waiting on the 66 pin penetrators to be soldered. Once they are ready to be installed, then the rest of the end caps will be assembled and the housings can be put together and sent off for pressure testing.
A connector with a red locking collar. That little slice of silver is the retaining ring that needs to be taken out in order to remove the locking collar.
We made it back to Miami on Sunday afternoon. We tied up the ship and helped the scientists unload equipment. Then we cleaned up the deck and
We have been looking into installing exhaust fans for the engine rooms. Most ships have good exhaust fans in the engine room to keep good air flow and pump the bad air out. Our engine rooms have supply fans but not exhaust fans. So our air flow is not that great. So we looked into installing fans. We ordered two large fans. We are looking to install them on the top of our exhaust stacks. The top of the stakes have large vents on their aft sides so we decided it was the perfect place to mount the fans. We unbolted the vent cover on the starboard side to access the top of the stack to get all our measurements. We also looked at our braker panel to figure out how we were going to wire the fan in. We found an open breaker to wire the fan and I calculated the wire gage we would need for it. We then bolted on some spacers to the frame of the fan so it would fit perfectly with minimal movement when we had it mounted in. We attached the weirs to the fan before we lifted it into place. We then had to hoist it up into place and bolt it in. Once it was in we wired it to the ship’s power with a switch. We could then put the vent cover back into place. The fan worked great. Now we will just have to do the starboard fan once we have some more time.
This is the fan in place!