COR_Su2016_05

Through a presentation. Just try to finish it the other day, but we were going to talk about the Alvin. And I can pass around these things. This is a study done in the mid 90s on undersea vehicles. And this is the report that we did for the National Science Foundation. The Alvin was commissioned in 1964, and it was a US Navy Office of Naval Research vessel. It had a steel, uh, I think it was HY-140 [HY-100] pressure vessel, okay. So this is our report, and somewhere over here I—

Yeah. Um, out of that report — you can pass this around — I'll talk about how I was, I had, I was the only out of like 36 people on this study. Uh, the National Research Council, well the National Academy of Sciences, was chartered by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, and they are not a government entity, but their building is right there across from the Lincoln Memorial right on the Mall. And uh, Congress will often commission them to do a study. So like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, they've now formed a new Gulf Marine committee to look at the pollution in the Gulf of Mexico and all the things that come out of that, because of how big that was.

But anyway, the National Academy spends about a half a billion dollars a year or so as part of the National Research Council doing studies. And so it turns out, after the Mansfield Amendment — anybody know what the Mansfield Amendment was, in 1972? You weren't even born then, okay. Uh, the Mansfield, Mike Mansfield was a congressman, he later became ambassador to Japan, and when he was a senator he passed the Mansfield Amendment, says the defense department is not allowed to do any research that's not related to national security. So all of a sudden a lot of stuff that the defense department had done was off limits and got transferred to other agencies like the National Science Foundation.

Now interestingly, just because I like to tell you, some of the things where the Navy was first: after World War II, people had seen, because of the Manhattan Project, radar — which, you know, the home of radar is right across from the student lounge here, just down the hall here. Uh, that was where the most valuable cargo across the Atlantic, which was the amplifier for radar, uh, microwaves — magnon, magnetron, yeah. I've got a picture of it in my office, but it's just a little thing like this, and it came to 4-131. And back in 1995, the British Broadcasting Company — that was my lab back then — wanted to take pictures there one Sunday on the 50th anniversary of VE Day. And I said, there's nothing there anymore that has to do with what it was 50 years ago. Oh no, we just want to take pictures in that room. Oh, okay.

So anyway, the Mansfield Amendment in '72, the Navy had to give up a lot of the stuff. The Alvin had a multi-purpose, it had some military purposes. It found, for example — one of the Alvin found the atom bomb that the Air Force had dropped off Spain, right, and the Soviets were out looking for it, we were out looking for it. Turns out supposedly the Alvin was the one that finally located the warhead. But in any case, the Alvin got transferred over to the National Science Foundation. Actually, the vessel was until recently still owned by the Office of Naval Research. The Office of Naval Research was founded in 1946 by the US Navy, because it took three or four years to get the legislation through to found the National Science Foundation. When the National Science Foundation was founded in 1948 or '49 or whatever, it was modeled after what the US Navy had already started three years before.

So you have the Office of Naval Research, which is the custodian of the 6.1 research money. You guys know about 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, and things like that. Congress has certain pots of money: 6.1 is basic research, 6.2 is exploratory development, 6.3 is advanced development, 6.4 is prototyping or something. So the Office of Naval Research is the basic research arm, has most of the 6.1 money. They have a little bit of 6.2, and their research laboratory is the Naval Research Labs, okay. They are the primary funder of the NRL. And then you have NAVAIR, and they have some 6.2 money, and you have NAVSEA and they have some 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 money, and their research lab — NAVSEA's research lab — is David Taylor, okay. So you have competing labs within the Navy in a sense. But one's for 6.1, and NAVAIR has some 6.1 money, but it's like 5% of their total, and ONR has some 6.2 money but it's like 10% of their total, okay.

Anyway, so the Alvin was commissioned, there's a history of the Alvin, there's a '64 version somewhere. Probably '68 or '70 they switched to a titanium hull. But it was still — well, they did upgrade the vessel, but basically it was the same vessel, and there were various upgrades until 2012. Actually this study was like 2003, 2004. The National Science Foundation was going to have $25 million in their capital budget for marine stuff, and people wanted surface ships for uh research, geophysical research and stuff, and the Navy, or the other people, wanted to upgrade the Alvin. Because the original Alvin kind of sank like a rock until it came to some level. You would put the right amount of ballast in, and to go back up you would just discharge all your iron weights. And some of the environmentalists were very concerned that we're leaving iron at the bottom of the ocean to rust. Don't tell them that 40% of the Earth's crust is iron oxide, but okay, we were rusting up the ocean, okay.

Uh anyway, but they wanted — what the scientists wanted is they wanted better viewing ports. There's now five ports around this thing. And they wanted the ability to come down to say 2,000 feet or 1,000 meters or something, hang around look at things, and then go down deeper, and essentially be able to have variable buoyancy, okay. So it had lots of upgrades they wanted. And they wanted to know whether they could afford it. Out of like 30, 36 people on this silly committee, I was the only one who was supposed to be there to figure out whether they could afford to build this thing. So you'll get a copy of this somewhere. Uh, but that's just more of the history.

And if you get to the upgrades: HD camera, larger personnel sphere so the three people could crawl around a little bit, five viewing ports. The viewing ports were more in line before — in the old Alvin, the pilot had a different view than the other people, and so they couldn't really see what they were looking for. A new syntactic foam designed to withstand pressure depths of 21,000 feet. So we go a little deeper, still can't go into the Marianas Trench, but who cares, that's only a very small fraction of the ocean. This would cover about 90, 99 plus percent of the ocean. Uh, the buoyancy foam, which I mentioned briefly before, new viewing ports, lithium-ion batteries, um, and syntactic foam.

Anyone work — no one's worked with syntactic foam, right? Um, syntactic foam costs about, well, ten years ago it was going for about $20,000 a cubic foot. And this is actually part of the Alvin, and you can work it. It's basically little micro glass spheres — and they can be lots of different sizes — encapsulated in a resin that will not be degraded by seawater over 10 or 20 years. But all plastics get degraded by seawater over 10 years, I mean that's the story of your rubber again, right. So you have these micro balloons, and depending on how you join them together, they now have syntactic foam that has a specific gravity of less than 0.5, so half the density of water. And this is in there for safety, so that if you lose your power you can pop to the surface because you're buoyant, self-buoyant.

Uh so they changed the viewing ports. There's actually two ports over here. When we were doing it 10 years ago we were looking at three ports, but when they finally did it they decided to put two more ports on the side. And you can see how people kind of have to crawl in here. Um, the pilot — I think I mentioned to you, whether you're talking the Sea Cliff — and frankly the Sea Cliff and other DSRVs were — the Navy, after they had the Thresher disaster — and someone said, uh, you going to do Thresher? Oh you are. Okay, you're going to do Thresher, anyway we'll talk about Thresher. But the Thresher was a big catharsis for the Navy. And they had a rush program in the mid-60s to develop deep-sea rescue vehicles, and they built some deep diving submersible rescue vehicles that you can look up.

Um, but anyway, there's — that's the one they finally built. It didn't cost 25 million. Um, Woods Hole had estimated they could build this, the new Alvin, for 6 and a half million. I estimated it would be 16 million, and that was still within 25 million. When they finally built it, I think it came in at 37 million, okay. Um, and we can talk about that. Um, pressure testing — this I think is David Taylor Carderock, I showed it to you quickly before. Here's the five ports, you can see four of them. Uh, and this vessel I think was a pressure vessel built to prove out 6,500 meter depth for, I think, the Sea Cliff. So the Sea Cliff had an 8-foot diameter sphere, and this was probably built for the Sea Cliff to verify the hull. And of course it's just sitting there doing nothing, so they verified it for the new Alvin, okay, to do the external pressure test.

We looked at a lot of things. Uh, one of the things we looked at was, could we use the Sea Cliff hull, because the Navy sort of had it in mothballs, but the titanium pressure sphere is not bad, it'll last forever in seawater, it's titanium. Uh, the problem was the weight. Turns out the Sea Cliff was somewhat bigger. The vessel that tends the Alvin is the Atlantis, and somewhere on this little sheet I handed out, I think it tells you. But the Sea Cliff was just too heavy, it was going to be too heavy to handle the Alvin, and so you could not buy a new ship along with your extra $9 million of NSF money. Um, but anyway, so this is the Sea Cliff, looks like the Alvin but it was larger, and it did lots of, not everything was classified, but it did lots of classified work for the Navy.

Uh, there's the Alvin's emergency separation. Um, if they have to, they can just dislodge themselves from everything else, and there's enough syntactic foam — and of course this pressure sphere itself is full of air, so it's self-buoyant, okay. So here I passed out was one of the pages from that little book I passed around, on the study. And this page was put together by Woods Hole, which basically manages the Alvin. There's the last cartoon here. Um, and they basically had just finished building the Jason 2, which was a tethered unmanned underwater vehicle, okay. And then if you look at the bottom, the weight of the Jason 2 was 7,200 pounds, $2,300,000. And they have all these different structural, ballast, power, instrumentation, blah, going down through here. And somehow I was supposed to work up all these numbers and decide whether they all made sense, excuse me, on a volunteer's time, okay. I mean aside from the fact I wasn't qualified to do it.

Um, but they also had the new HOV, which is the new Alvin, and they had estimated the weight was going to be 33,700 pounds and the cost was 6.5 million. Does anyone see a discrepancy here? The weight ratio gets you over about 10. Yeah. You're going to have a manned vehicle that's going to cost less per pound? Okay, so let's just treat this as a nice sirloin steak and figure out the cost per pound. It turns out the Jason costs $320 a pound, and Woods Hole thought they could build a manned vehicle that was untethered, okay, and only — and build it for $193 a pound.

Okay. Yeah. Well, the actual cost probably came in at — well, the actual cost ended up coming in at about $1,000 a pound. The reason it was — what — well, what did I do? I took, in fact I reproduced my numbers from 10 years ago, I took those numbers, okay, I divided them, and I said, well, you're not going to even build it for $320 a pound, which was the price of the Jason. Let's just say it's 400 million, $400 a pound times 33,000 pounds, and I came up with about 13.5 million. I said, well, I better add a little extra on that, so let's call it 16 million. So I gave this bid, or this estimate, that you could build the new Alvin — this was in 2004 — for 16 million. Which the folks in Woods Hole, that were not on the committee but they could come and listen to the committee and stuff, they weren't pleased. Because they knew — well, they weren't pleased because I was basically saying their numbers were crap. But they were. Okay, I'm sorry, they were. Okay. Uh, my numbers were just a shot in the dark, um, but at least it was a little more thoughtful shot in the dark than their stuff, which was pure optimism on every cost-cutting corner.

Um, in any case, what happened is in 2007, when they're about to let the contract, China just sort of blew open the metals market. Everything, like the price of titanium doubled and tripled, everything. China just started, before the big financial crisis of 2008, China started going out on the world market and buying up all the metal in the world, it was just incredible. And prices of everything, whether it was aluminum or steel or anything, prices were doubling and tripling. Um, the other problem was that when they built the Sea Cliff in the first Alvin, or the first titanium-hulled Alvin, in 1970 or whatever, we had a certain infrastructure that could build some of these things. By the mid 90s we had lost that infrastructure. And you have the same problem in trying to build submarines, or surface ships and everything else. I mean, we used to have — I guess we still have two sub yards, but they sort of share, okay. Now, but it used to be 30 years ago, you know, one year you give the contract to Newport News for a sub, and the next year you give it to Electric Boat, and you just keep oscillating. Well then eventually they got to the point they didn't have enough subs to give everybody a new sub every year, so now they share. Uh, but we didn't have the infrastructure, and so it wasn't clear.

Now we had other options in here. Um, on the Stellar I copied a number of other pages out of this thing, and it tells you out of the report, it tells you all the different vessels that will go down to several thousand meters depth. And I was surprised, I mean the Japanese have one, Shinkai 6500, and they use it about once or twice a year, okay, typical Japanese stuff. There was Mir 1 and 2, okay, the Soviets had some steel hulls that they were willing to sell us on the cheap, okay, mostly because, well one of them they never wanted to put in the water because it wasn't clear it could take the pressure. There are a few problems with some of these things, plus you have all the corrosion problems on high-strength steel, that of hydrogen embrittlement and stuff. Uh, the Alvin originally was 4,500 meters and the new Alvin is like 6,500 meters. So there's some interesting statistics on some of that stuff. Uh, and there's a trade-off table on maneuvering characteristics and construction and ship infrastructure.

So it was — wasn't a comprehensive study, but it was a reasonable study, and it still came off by more than a factor of two in cost. But part of it was, when American industry found out the NSF was really going to do it, they started jacking up the prices. There were literally only one or two places that could do it, and that was one of my concerns when I was trying to bid it. I kept on saying, you know, we don't have these facilities anymore, where we used to build these things. Um, and that's a problem, not just for the Alvin but it's a problem for virtually everything else. When the Navy built the Sea Cliff, they did it at Mare Island, okay. Um, and partly they wanted to give — that was when the Navy still in the idea of naval shipyards building things, rather than just repairing them. Um, and they wanted to get the experience, and they tried to prove out the welding technology that had been developed at David Taylor in Annapolis, gas metal arc welding, and they couldn't do it. I mean they just tried for six months and it just didn't work. Um, and they finally used gas tungsten arc. Took a year to build that hull, because gas tungsten arc puts down a little bitty bead about the size of a wire, okay, and just kind of building up a two-and-a-quarter-inch-thick weld, uh, takes a while when you're laying things down like that at four inches a minute, of a guy sitting there like this, okay. But they built it, you know, if you want to spend the money.

Um, but you're not going to have it. It really gets down: do you want to have three or four steel subs versus one titanium sub? That's the trade-off when you really get down to it, okay. Student: Can you do [radiography on titanium]? Titanium with that thickness, you can do radiography, but ultrasonics would be fine. UT is fine, because it's just a groove weld, okay.

Um, which is actually an interesting story that I was talking to somebody after class. Um, around 1996 or '97, NAVSEA, David Taylor, came out with a new directive saying you didn't have to do x-rays in a shipyard, you could either do UT or x-rays. And within a year all the commercial shipyards, whether it's Electric Boat or David Taylor or Bath or Ingalls or whatever, they all had gone to UT. Because the problem if you've been in a shipyard with x-rays is, you have to have about 30 people around to be able to take a — for one guy to do an x-ray, you have to have about 30 guards to make sure no rats come rushing into the area to get radiated, or people either.

Student: [inaudible — comment about doing x-rays at night] Yeah, so no, you can't do it. You used to do it at night, you're telling me that now officially they only do radiography during the week, during day shift, because 15 years ago somebody got their — they went blind. Student: Yeah, that's interesting, because Newport shipbuilding almost exclusively does it on every — Tom: Every other shipyard that is delivering on time. Uh, well, so every other shipyard does it, and it is terrible. Student: We would lose — you mean there would just be days you just wouldn't get — Tom: Yeah. So I, well, the point is, I actually had a 2N student about 10 years ago, so in the early 2000s, um, he did a study of why the Navy yards are still doing radiography. In fact, you told me you're the only people who buy film anymore. And they're now talking about, the Navy's modernizing, they're going to go to digital x-rays. Student: Might go to digital, but the cost to do it is being explored. Tom: Well, you could save all of that cost if you just got rid of those 30 watchmen on, you know, radiography — about $2 million a shift. Student: Well everybody's been doing it. Tom: Everybody who's trying to do things for least cost.

The Navy shipyards are not there to save money, you need to understand. They're there to preserve civil service jobs. Student: Yeah. Tom: Well I mean, this is — you need to understand some of the politics here. You're sitting there worrying about, where can I get $2 million to do something that's going to keep a ship afloat, and they're blowing 4 million dollars on welfare. Okay, so it's just a minor management problem. But there's tens and tens of millions of dollars to be saved by someone having the guts to tell the civil service folks that you're going to have to work efficiently, okay. I mean, it'd be better to pay them to sit in the wardroom and drink coffee and donuts and do nothing, than to sit out there making sure the rats don't get irradiated, you know. But that's what they do.

Anyway, so the Alvin was just a minor overrun compared to x-ray inspection in naval shipyards today. And I mean this has been going on for 20 years. As a taxpayer, I'm not particularly pleased, okay. Anyway, okay, see you tomorrow, and we'll—