I've thought about this too. Even though you wouldn't have caught me on the Titan sub even if they paid me to be there, the speed at which these people went out is definitely kin to the way that I would "like" to go. I want the bomb to be a direct hit with none of the "pain and suffering" to go with it. Wishful thinking, I'm sure.
Sod that
......... I'd like to go drunk as a skunk and surrounded by hookers
To your concerns, out of the millions of these things in use some by people that have zero common sense, how many have failed? If my favorite rocket scientist was still with us I'd ask him, he built the bodies of missiles well, technically he did the engineering for them. Wasn't one of those diversity admissions to collage, like apparently the designers of that sub were.
First off, welcome to the party!!
I too had some doubts when I initially got into PCPs, so I only used aluminum bottles for quite a while because I thought they were mechanically stronger (and they still may be), but I got caught up against the thermal expansion of the tank was too high that it broke my 3D printed tank support when I was in a match. This sucked, so I changed to CF because they expand less, and as @HogKiller mentioned, these have been in use for years with people being really hard on them...and they survive.
The point of CF is to restrict the amount of expansion of the core, key word is EXPANSION NOT CONTRACTION, the stuff has tensile strength, worked on centrifuge buckets day in and day out, never heard of one failing, least of all spinning at 30k to 40k rpm. I will say that the aluminum we used was a bit thicker than the bottles, BUT not having seen a bottle whacked in half, I'm only guessing. Next is the proper angle for the CF, I vaguely remember it was about 30º, it's been a while, may have been less..First off, welcome to the party!!
I too had some doubts when I initially got into PCPs, so I only used aluminum bottles for quite a while because I thought they were mechanically stronger (and they still may be), but I got caught up against the thermal expansion of the tank was too high that it broke my 3D printed tank support when I was in a match. This sucked, so I changed to CF because they expand less, and as @HogKiller mentioned, these have been in use for years with people being really hard on them...and they survive.
So this Titan tragedy seemed like a good entry point for this conversation. I felt confident that the CF would do a better job at keeping the pressure in, than keeping it out, but the stress cracks exacerbated over time was what I was wondering about and thought that the TONS of experience that we have on this forum may shed some light on this question. Well, @Kraemer99 shared his experience of a tank rupturing that was pretty uneventful, and that was the only example that was shared, so this seems like pretty good odds to me.
Here is a cross section of the bottle from Huma:
I meant the actual cross section not some CAD drawing/rendering. I've got some serious doubts that Stockton had a clue about the actual structural engineering but simply read about the strength of CF but didn't read the next paragraph about tension vs compression or proper layering. Not that I would have made a lick of difference.
The cte of carbon composite is almost nil. The cte of aluminum is.003 per inch at 350f. The aluminum liner in our scba tanks can be thought of as an inner tube in a tire. Inside a tire it can hold a 100+ psi but out side of a tire ........
