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"Subhuman Project" Human Powered Submarine
overThruster writes "Inventor Ted Ciamillo and marine biologist Frank Fish (yes, that's his real name) are at work on a human-powered sub designed to cross the Atlantic. What's interesting is the highly efficient propulsion system which uses a 'tail' modeled after CAT scans of a dolphin's. From the article: 'Ciamillo and Fish say they knew they were onto something when the first prototype Lunocet, a piece of sculpted foam sandwiched between two pieces of carbon fiber, essentially swam by itself. When they released it at the bottom of a test pool, its buoyancy combined with its cambered shape generated a forward thrust that made it scoot across the tank.'"
I'd like to see, more than the sub itself, an in-depth discussion of the mechanism behind the dolphin's tail (the foam between carbon fiber).
With it being a water-filled system instead of an air-filled pressurized tube, I'd be interested in knowing how deep it can dive without squishing the person inside. The article says he's going to spend just over a month "living" in it at 2 meters underwater, but if they're going to call it a submarine, I'd like to see it go deeper than that.
It should be interesting to see if the DHS chases this thing down as one of those evil drug running semi-submersibles, as they are now illegal (by U.S. law) to operate in international waters...
Er, "fricken' laser beams, I mean...
Scientists eaten by sharks. "They looked delicious" - JAWS
Overheard at Frank's (yes, that's his real name) retirement: "So long, and thanks for all, Fish."
rewriting history since 2109
"uses a 'tail' modeled after CAT scans of a dolphin's"
Let's hope it doesn't get caught by a trawler fishing for tuna.
full article
STOP posting multipage versions of articles !!!
Carbon and sculpted foam? What the hell? I've been wasting freaking decades and tens of thousands of dollars on DeLoreans for my time machine. Guess I'll head out to Walmart in my ADD-enhanced attempt to break fundamental laws of physics.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Let's hear it for Nominative Determinism!
And he's not the only Mr Fish in Marine Biology.
So what's the submarine called? The SS Untermensch?
But is it really any use? If it moves in a direction when started from the bottom of the tank is it actually of any practical use? presumably it's only the buoyancy action combined with it's shape that thrust it forward such that if you start it near the surface it wont do anything.
Effectively rather than forward motion, does this only offer diagonal upwards motion? i.e. can it work without being started some distance below the surface?
I'm not sure crossing the atlantic would be that fun if you have to be dragged to the ocean floor repeatedly and launched diagonally upwards in the general direction.
This is not a submarine. This is a boat that happens to float two meters below the surface of the water.
Depth control consists of him swimming to the surface, filling a bladder with air, and then attaching it to the sub.
And I'm not impressed with his claims that it practically "swam by itself." Getting something to move horizontally when provided with vertical buoyancy and travel is not exactly what one would call difficult, and it has nothing to do with how efficient the boat is or isn't under power.
SirWired
He plans to pedal 2 metres below the surface all day, coming up only at night when he will sleep in a tent erected on the top of the sub. If the wind is blowing in the right direction he'll fly a kite to gain a few extra miles while he sleeps.
So, it looks like they'll be supplementing human power with wind power. That's kind of disappointing.
'Ciamillo and Fish say they knew they were onto something when the first prototype Lunocet, a piece of sculpted foam sandwiched between two pieces of carbon fiber, essentially swam by itself.
Yes, that's called gliding. It happens whenever a thin flat surface moves freely through a fluid. Aeroplanes and gliders use this all the time. The keel on a sailboat and the rudder on a ship use the same principle. Many autonomous underwater vehicles use buoyancy gliding as a method of propulsion. Increase the density of the robot by compressing an air bladder, and the robot sinks. Fins convert the vertical drop into a forward glide. Expand the air bladder, the robot gets less dense and rises. Again the fins convert the vertical motion into forward motion.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...fishy here. (I'm sorry I had to do it) But won't he get tired to death before leaving the first 200 miles off-shore? Fishes give up migrations all the time, can't you?
Out of curiosity, how deep does a submersible have to be able to dive before you'd classify it as a submarine? Every dictionary I've checked only defines it, more or less, as a vessel capable of operating submerged; there is no mention whatsoever of a depth requirement to classify it as such.
Depth control consists of him swimming to the surface, filling a bladder with air, and then attaching it to the sub
I didn't see that stated in the article. My impression was more that they'd use some of the compressed air in the scuba tanks, or perhaps a different dedicated tank, to accomplish this. The fact is that wet subs aren't all that uncommon.
Personally, I'd call this one a submersible, rather than a submarine. A submarine is typically much more autonomous than this thing would be (TFA states he'd have a chase boat for air tanks, etc).
You know the thing about UDP jokes? I don't care if you get it or not.
I thought I read something else in the story.
Is slashdot sure they didn't mispell lunocet as lunotic/lunatic?
Guess there's always 4chan...
There are a couple of comments on the new scientist site about his skin probably blistering off due to being submerged in a wetsuit for that long. Ouch.
We all live in a human-powered submarine,
human-powered submarine,
human-powered submarine!
Yes, the drugs are responsible for this album,
responsible for this album,
responsible for this album.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Stainless steel wire instead of something like Spectra or Dyneema? What about the motion losses from pedaling under water? Why bother with this crap of crossing the ocean, when it's clear he'll have a chase boat with provisions, etc? Obviously he can't stay in the water for 50+ days. Seems like there were a lot of very bad engineering decisions made on this thing. In addition, I can't believe he'd suggest going under water only a meter or two in the ocean. Does he now how large the waves get, and what will happen if he hits any type of real weather out there?
Jingo is not his best book by far, but he has in it a human powered submarine with a tail that imitates a dolphin.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Dolphin's tail is my
plan for submarine
plan for submarine
plan for submarine
Using foam is
the way to keep it cheap
the way to keep it cheap
the way to keep it cheap
And our friends love making tails
There's no way
That we can fail
And there's air inside our tanks
(HORN SECTION GO!)
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I claim prior art! Hell, I am prior art!
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
But the "untermensch u-boot" wasn't a big success.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Self Contained Underwater Breathing Aparatus.
It was air tight, contained an airsupply, and was powered by my moving my legs.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Hope they have better luck than the human-powered Hunley, a Confederate sub that sank a US ship then itself sank on the way back in. First sub to sink a warship!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.L._Hunley
I think the propulsion system would be much more efficient if the occupant's body wasn't surrounded by water while he/she pedals.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
BTW - Slashdot doesn't work with Internet Explorer, the #1 most popular web browser in the world. I wonder how much of an audience they're losing.
Both of them?
When I was a kid I used to buy these little delta winged Styrofoam airplanes at the dime store. The were meant to be launched via a rubber band and a small tab on their underside. However I used to play with them in my grandfather's pool instead. I'd go down to the bottom in the deep end, flip the "plane" upside down, and release. Result? It traveled nearly the length of the pool straight as a string and fairly quickly before surfacing. It was a pretty neat discovery for me as a small child :-)
So, I too am not really too impressed by the fact that this thing moved forward when it attempted to float to the surface. I fail to see how that equates to decent propulsion performance from a tail that was modeled after a dolphin.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Isn't it very unhealthy for your skin to spend that much time submerged in sea water.
Not to mention it can't be that comfortable, hypothermia issues?
Let's see... you're in a wetsuit in a submarine needing to take a dump, can feel the runs coming on, maybe, and there's a 50 foot swell, so you can't surface... what ya gonna do? Sounds like a shitty deal.
If Ciamillo's design work with bicycle parts is any indicator of his talent as an engineer, they'll pull this one off.
I'm fortunate enough to have a pair of his Zero Gravity (0G-Ti) brakes on my road bike, and they're insanely light (the pair weighs less than a Dura-Ace front caliper) and have been pleasant to work on, and require very little maintenance.
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Does his middle name begin with "N"?
He has to be submerged for more than a month. There's got to be some real nasty side effects to this. Furthermore, it's sort of like a zero G environment so there may be some negative impact there as well.
"When they released it at the bottom of a test pool, its buoyancy combined with its cambered shape generated a forward thrust that made it scoot across the tank."
OK--I'll bet it stopped going forward right around the time it got to the surface of the water.
It's interesting to compare this latest reincarnation of the human-powered sub to the eight-man, candle-lit Hunley that (briefly) prowled the waters off the coast of South Carolina during the (U.S.) Civil War.
Should any disaster strike, or shark bite the fin off, I wonder, if the sub, would plummet to the bottom of the ocean as a real fish would without its fin, did they think to come up with possible alternative plan in case, cuz' it ain't like stepping out and changing a flat tire!!!
So, in collaboration with marine biologist Frank Fish of West Chester University in Pennsylvania, who specialises in...
A guy named Frank Fish decided to be a marine biologist? How original.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
Normal subs don't require the person to be in water. This sub is a "wet sub" where the inside is filled with water. However, I'm assuming he will sleep dry at night above the sub.
had an ad in them for a submarine human powered...
PRIOR ART!!!
If you want to know about marine mammal hydrodynamics, Dr. Frank E. Fish is the guy to go to. Take a look at some of his papers available for free download from Google Scholar:
http://scholar.google.co.th/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=FE+Fish&btnG=Search
This guy has been at it for ages. He was my primary source of information for a research paper on the subject of hydrodynamics and energetics back in 2000 for a marine mammalogy class in my final year of university. Glad to see he is still at it, because his work is brilliant. There's some pretty high level physics involved (fluid mechanics is not for the faint of heart ;) ), but still worth checking out.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Wet subs aren't that uncommon, but they are generally propelled by electric motors, etc. They don't usually use human power. He's going to be working against the resistance of the water he's surrounded in. He'd have to do a LOT less work in a transoceanic journey if he was only fighting air resistance and not water resistance.
The fact that its a wet sub STILL doesn't matter. He's on earth. There's gravity. Being in the water, wet, doesn't magically mean that gravity no longer applies. Even being neutrally buoyant, his heart still has to pump blood against gravity.
On a similar and yet much cooler note, I encourage everyone to visit www.Expedition360.com , a most awesome site about a brits attempt to circumnavigate the globe only via unsuplemented human power. Read through the entire diary and you'll feel like you've read a great and fufilling book. Highly, highly recommended.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I remember seeing an analysis of what this is on TV. No anchor links, but just do a find on "Subhuman".
http://www.thetick.ws/tvvillains.html
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
...J.R. "Bob" Dobbs maybe?
Frankly, this sounds a ted fishy... A dolphin-based submarine?!
I am not devoid of humor.
I would have figured something like a Steel Albatross variable buoyancy blended wing body submersible would have been more interesting, and possibly more efficient use of human mechanical power. Use the bicycle crank to operate the main buoyancy piston, and just do the repeated surface/dive action to move forward like those Slocum glider UUV's. I suppose the limitation then is on the body's capacity for repeated dive cycles. I imagine depth limits to prevent the bends will be important.