Alvin and Sea Cliff deep-ocean research submersible development

Material evolution from HY-80/HY-130 steel (original Alvin, 1960s) to Ti-6Al-4V (new Alvin, early 1970s, 40-year service life). Sea Cliff (~1980) is the larger 8-foot prototype using heavier-section titanium. Heavy-section welding (2 to 2.25 inches) is the central technical problem of the lecture.

These are heavy forgings and plates. The Sea Cliff was built out of Ti-100. They prototype larger things first — they start making little laboratory specimens the size of a notebook, test those for properties, and then do a prototype development. The Alvin, the original Alvin research submarine, was made with a steel hull, a high-strength steel — HY-80 or HY-130 — because it was back in the '60s. By the early '70s, they switched and built the new Alvin with Ti-6-4. They just got rid of the old Alvin and built a new one — the same titanium hull was used for about 40 years. The new hull is also titanium.

Submersibles as prototype platforms for HY-series alloy welding experience.

This is another problem with our pressure vessels. You guys still use ASME pressure vessel steels. Almost all of those were developed in the 1940s, and it would cost probably half a billion dollars to qualify new steels for pressure vessels. The Department of Energy has tried to qualify 9% nickel steel — sorry, nickel-1-molybdenum — to use at higher temperatures for some of the nuclear reactors. They've been doing this for 40 years, and people are still somewhat hesitant. They haven't got a big enough database out there until you actually start building prototypes and get experience. That's why the Navy, before they went to an all-HY100 hull, built a couple of full-size 30-foot-diameter sections for a couple of boomers back in the 90s and put them in service, even though they were still on HY80. They wanted to get the experience with welding it. And even when they did go to a full-sized ship — Sea Wolf in the 90s — they still had major problems. One of the reasons for building things like Alvin and the Sea Cliff was as part of the prototyping research exercise. You build small submersibles, deep-submergence things, but it also gives you experience with fabricating what they hoped would be the next HY-series alloys.

Referenced as the prior generation of US titanium-hulled submersibles whose fabrication base no longer exists. Sea Cliff completion at Mare Island with gas tungsten arc welding cited as the cautionary precedent for the new Alvin cost estimate.

Woods Hole had estimated $2 million in their 2001 estimate of $13 million — I'd taken the $6.5 million and doubled it. "The sources of the original titanium plate and the forging facilities used to fabricate the Alvin and Sea Cliff titanium pressure hulls in the 1970s no longer exist. The United States has extremely limited industrial experience in welding heavy section titanium. Soviets and Japanese have some." We could go over there and have them build it for us. The Soviets could have done a great job — believe me, they built these.

Tom's role on the ~36-person National Academy of Sciences committee (2003–2004) tasked with evaluating whether NSF's $25 million capital budget could fund a new Alvin replacement. Used to teach: cost-per-pound analysis methodology, infrastructure loss in US shipbuilding, the gap between Woods Hole's $6.5M estimate and Tom's $16M estimate and the actual $37M outcome, and the syntactic-foam buoyancy technology.

Full historical arc — Alvin built in steel in the 1960s by the Office of Naval Research; converted to titanium hull in the 1970s; ran until roughly 2005-2010; replacement build came in at $50M against Woods Hole's $6M estimate (Tom predicted $15M, the closest of the three). Sea Cliff treated as a parallel Navy effort that failed at GMAW and reverted to slow GTAW.

The reason we never built a titanium submarine — well, we did build titanium submarines. The Alvin, the nice little Alvin submarine, the one that goes down and finds the Titanic and such. Originally built out of steel in the 1960s and 1970s. Who owned the Alvin originally? Actually, who still owns the Alvin? Originally it was owned by the Office of Naval Research. The US Navy built it for deep-sea work, and they were interested in deep-sea work because in the early sixties an American plane not too far from Spain dropped a nuclear warhead in the ocean by accident. It wasn't open — soon as a big oops, and the Soviets, all their ships, converged in that area of the Atlantic. Fortunately we found it before the Soviets found it, so we got our weapon back. There have been times the Soviets lost some things in the ocean, and we actually got some of those things back.