[PSUBS-MAILIST] Vanguard class sub (UK) unintended depth excursion

[Alan James via Personal_Submersibles]

True,You could be risking your life on the reading of one instrument.I am thinking that an external pressure sensing module could be made up, with 3 electronic pressure sensors in it.Oil filled with a diaphragm to transfer the pressure.The wires for all three come in through one through hull to a computer like an arduino that compares the readings.Alan

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  On Tue, 21 Nov 2023 at 5:57 am, Sean T. Stevenson via Personal_Submersibles<personal_submersibles at psubs.org> wrote:   Just read an article about an incident with a British Vanguard Class submarine that had an incident where it went far too deep, apparently as a result of faulty instrumentation. Engineers became aware of the sub's depth when they observed some backup depth instrument(s) and rectified the situation before it became a castastrophe.

Just wanted to prompt some discussion here, because PSubs don't necessarily employ robust backup systems, and at minimum, we should endeavour to ensure that all critical instrumentation is periodically calibrated to some reference standard to ensure accuracy, and also periodically verified in order to have some mechanism in place to detect malfunctioning instruments.

Backup instrumentation is a great method to achieve the latter (instrument verification), but comparing the primary and backup instruments needs to be part of SOPs. Where backups don't exist, some means of functional verification should at least be employed, if not per dive, then perhaps per trip?

This was a military sub that was almost lost because of an easily avoidable problem.

FWIW.

Sean

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