Their story, in their words…
Overall, despite the submarine being a success, we faced many challenges and dilemmas along the way which drew us further to limits we didn’t know we could achieve.
The making of the submarine began with the research during April 2024 where we expanded on numerous technical and physical aspects of making a submarine. We designed a hull and delegated tasks for further work to researching parts, software engineering, and constructing all had been overseen by each other making so no task isolated to one member.
We made plastic models imitating the smaller hull we wanted to recreate making them float and sink to see if our calculations were correct. We learnt that the universe can be very brutal and does not care about our feelings; it’ll flood destroy and break and burn at the most inconvenient of times this presented challenges which were often fun in retrospect to overcome (as we gotten lucky) but presented turmoil to us morally.
We had a roadblock to the project planning to finish our planning for the exams during summer during this time we secured some fundraising for the project. Late July to August, we completed our research and compiled our ideas, we were drained of time but received an extension of two weeks which was enough to buy our parts and build the submarine shopping locally to have a visual of the items.
We did not rush the submarine and did cumulative tests to account for new variables which we had learnt from before. We were able to ensure the submarine would not flood from unproper sealing, tilt from a unmetrical ballast tank nor spin from an unstable propeller and much more. We were able to seal each electronic component separately for insurance if the worst did happen and had lots of empty space at the end which made it easy for us to work with and modular making it viable for reuse. We had to make sacrifices to our original proposal.
We decided that placing a camera in the submarine was too risky for the current time. We couldn’t have rudder as we lacked a gear mechanism for turning, we considered having a two-propeller system as a solution to this where a horizontal propeller could be switched on to turn the submarine clockwise but without beforehand accounting for this, we didn’t see to it.
Also seeing that we had a more reliable connection with wires we created a wire guidance system instead of following the advice of one of our Mark evasion supervisors. Ultimately after cumulatively testing each component the system we could see it floated and sunk well although our pump was quite underpowered.
Aswell as our propeller and our ballast tank was also a bit too small which we fixed as we could add deadweights to our RC submarine to make it dive deeper without surpassing ours dive limit. We tested the Submarine a bath and a pool, seeing it perform lit our hearts, we seen our submarine being able to face waves and wind well without rolling as well as the higher pressure.
Although we see that its motor was barley keeping up, so we cut the test short furthermore we had no measures other than a before and after multimeter to see the charge in the battery meaning we had no clue of our submarine battery life other than calculation which we unwisely hadn’t account during the time. We plan on expanding to project being able to handle those stresses for a trial in the Thames.
Communication: proved to be more difficult than we expected due to the lack of time some of the members had over the summer, which affected the work we were able to produce over the term.
Furthermore, researching and purchasing the parts we would use for our submarine proved to be a problematic task as there were aspects we failed to consider. Which went simultaneously with starting the construction of the submarine, such as power supply scaling, propeller testing, soldering, waterproofing and much more… This setback proved to be a blessing in disguise as not only did our critical thinking skills sharpen our technical and research skills.
We were reflecting on our errors and fixing them throughout the journey, we developed our resilience, as no matter how tough the task was, we never gave up and found a solution to any problem. Despite us feeling defeated during the end of the summer, the last two weeks allowed us to pick ourselves back up and push forward with the task as we were able to finalise the research with a better understanding of how the parts worked as well as completing the overall construction of the submarine. The project turned out to be a humbling process having to find stop-gap solutions and set our trust to our group unity. We had to do our best to achieve the most going above and beyond.
Despite failures, we believe the setbacks we faced made the project’s success more satisfactory. Highlights were the construction of the submarine. It showed us a final step in the right direction and execution of our plans.
Through using the technical skills at our disposal, we created a unique ballast tank that is set underneath the submarine rather than building it from scratch. We also sought subtle knowledge from niches of the RC building community; we made the submarine rechargeable using lithium batteries and not sealing it shut. The ballast tank acted as a removal slide from under the hull cylinder of the submarine allowing us for easy access furthermore, we decided on using plastic seals at the end of the hull for ease of access and already designed watertightness.
We calculated a propeller which would best match the torque of our motors which we waterproofed with a vegetable oil isolation chamber and created a more frictionless propeller. We isolated components in case of flood.
We’re proud of this project for teaching us commitment, humility and teamwork.
