全海深载人潜水器用浮力材料的初步研究

目前我国有两台全海深载人潜水器和几台全海深无人潜水器和着陆器正在研制。在所有的这些深海装备中,全海深载人潜水器代表着深海技术的制高点。要设计一台全海深载人潜水器,如何来选择浮力材料就是其中的关键问题之一。文章针对全海深载人潜水器浮力材料选择过程中所涉及的各种问题开展初步研究。通过研究,获得的主要结论是,满足规范要求的1.5倍安全系数的浮力材料目前还没有。如果要降低安全系数,根据有限的试验数据的经验外插,可以把安全系数降至1.4,但需要对满足1.4倍安全系数的浮力材料开展深入的吸水率特性研究。同时,针对现有浮力材料密度过大的问题,文中提出了一种在大型浮力块中添加陶瓷球的思路,可以把密度从0.7 g/cm~3下降至0.64 g/cm~3。该文的研究可为全海深载人潜水器浮力材料的选择提供一定的理论基础。

A Preliminary Study on the Buoyancy Materials for the Use in Full Ocean Depth Manned Submersibles

Currently, there are two full ocean depth (FOD) manned submersibles and several un-manned submersibles and landers are under development in China. Within all the deep sea investi-gation platforms, manned submersible represents the highest technology challenge. In the design of the FOD manned submersible, the issue how to select the buoyancy material became one of the main obstacles. In this paper, a preliminary study is carried out on the various issues related to the selec-tion of buoyancy materials for the use in FOD manned submersibles. The main discovery is that buoyancy materials fully satisfied the classification society rule requirement of 1.5 safety factor do not exist and from an extrapolation of limited experimental data, the minimum safety factor may be reduced to 1.4, but this needs to be confirmed by further experiments. The density of currently avail-able buoyancy materials is a bit too high and a new method to add ceramic macrospheres into a large buoyancy block is proposed. This study may lay a foundation for the further study based on ex-isting available buoyancy materials rather than producing another new brand which costs both time and money.