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Submarines
The worst thing that could ever happen to you on a ship in the middle of the
ocean would be for water to flood in and make you sink to the seabed. But if
you're on-board a submarine, that's exactly what you want! Unlike ships, which
pitch and roll as they struggle across the waves, submarines slip swiftly and
silently through the calmer waters beneath. They are lean, mean, military
machines and they can stay submerged for weeks or even months at a time.
Let's take a closer look at how they work!
What is a submarine?
Oceans are most turbulent where wind meets water: on their surface. The waves
that race across the sea are a sign of energy, originally transmitted by the Sun
and whipped up into winds, racing from one side of the planet to the other. Ships
battle and lurch across tough seas where no fishworth its saltwould ever
swim. Sailing ships make good use of winds, harnessing the gusts of air to make
a very effective form of propulsion. Diesel-powered ships stay on the surface for
a different reason: their engines need a steady supply of oxygen to burn fuel. In
theory, it should be much easier for ships to swim under the waves where the
water is calmer and puts up less resistance; in practice, that creates a different
set of problems.

If you've ever gone snorkeling or scuba diving, you'll know that life underwater is
very different from life on the surface. It's dark and difficult to see, there's no air
to breathe, and intense water pressure makes everything feel uncomfortable and
claustrophobic. Submarines are ingenious bits of engineering designed to carry
people safely through this very harsh environment. Although they were originally
invented as military machines, and most large subs are still built for the world's
navies, a few smaller subs do work as scientific research vessels. Most of these
are submersibles (generally small, unpowered, one- or two-person submarines
tethered to scientific research ships as they operate).
Parts of a submarine
hese are some of the key parts of a typical submarine.

Pressure hull

The pressure of water pushing inward is the biggest problem for anyone who
wants to go deep beneath the ocean surface. Even with scuba tanks, we can dive
only so far because the immense pressure soon makes it impossible to breath. At
a depth of 600m (2000ft), the maximum depth subs ever dive to, the water
pressure is over 60 times greater than it is at the surface!

How do subs survive where people can't? The hull of a standard ship is the
metal outside that keeps the water out. Most submarines have two hulls,
one inside the other, to help them survive. The outer hull is waterproof,
while the inner one (called the pressure hull) is much stronger and
resistant to immense water pressure. The strongest submarines have hulls made
from tough steel or titanium.
Ballast tanks

There are spaces in between the two hulls that can be filled with either air
or water. These are called the ballast tanks. When they are filled with air, the
submarine rises to the surface; with water inside the tanks, the sub sinks
towards the seabed. By changing the amount of water or air in the tanks,
the submarine alters its buoyancy (ability to float) so it can move close to the
surface or deeper down. The tanks at the front (known as the front trim tanks)
are usually filled with water or air first, so the submarine's front (bow) falls or
rises before its rear (stern).
Engine

Gasoline engines and diesel engines used by cars and trucks, and jet engines
used by planes, need a supply of oxygen from the air to make them work. Things
are different for submarines, which operate underwater where there is no
air. Most submarines except nuclear ones have diesel-electric engines. The
diesel engine operates normally when the sub is near the surface but it doesn't
drive the sub's propellers directly. Instead, it powers an electricity generator
that charges up huge batteries. These drive an electric motor that, in turn,
powers the propellers. Once the diesel engine has fully charged the
batteries, the sub can switch off its engine and go underwater, where it relies
entirely on battery power.
Early military submarines used breathing tubes called snorkels to feed air to their
engines from the air above the sea, but that meant they had to operate very
near the surface where they were vulnerable to attack from airplanes. Most
large military submarines are now nuclear-powered. Like nuclear power
plants, they have small nuclear reactors and, since they need no air to
operate, they can generate power to drive the electric motors and
propellers whether they are on the surface or deep underwater.

Tower

Submarines are cigar-shaped so they can slip smoothly through the water. But
in the very center, there's a tall tower packed with navigation and other
equipment. Sometimes known as the conning tower (because, historically, it
contained a submarines controls), it's also referred to simply as the tower or
the sail.

Planes

Sailor looking through a periscope

Just as sharks have fins on their bodies to help them swim and dive, so
submarines have fins called diving planes or hydroplanes. They work a bit
like the wings and control surfaces (swiveling flaps) on an airplane. As the
sub's propellers push it forward, water rushes over the planes, creating an
upward or downward force that helps the sub gradually rise or fall. The fins
can be tilted to change the angle at which it climbs or dives through the
sea.
Navigation systems

Photo: Periscopes are useful if you're near the surface searching for enemy
ships but they're useless underwater. Photo by Jeffery S. Viano courtesy of US
Navy.

Light doesn't travel well through water, so it gets darker and darker the deeper
down you go. Most of the time, submarine pilots can't even see where they're
going! Submarines have periscopes (seeing tubes that can be pushed up
through the tower), but they're useful only when subs are on the surface or just
beneath it. Submarines navigate using a whole range of electronic equipment.
There's GPS satellite navigation, for starters, which uses space satellites to
tell the submarine its position. There's also SONAR, a system similar to radar,
which sends out pulses of sound into the sea and listens for echoes reflecting off
the seabed or other nearby submarines. Another important navigation system
onboard a submarine is known as inertial guidance. It's a way of using
gyroscopes to keep track of how far the submarine has traveled, and in which
direction, without referring to any outside information. Inertial guidance is
accurate only for so long (10 days or so) and occasionally needs to be corrected
using GPS, radar, or other data.
Life-support systems

A large military submarine has dozens of people onboard. How can they eat,
sleep, and breathe, buried deep beneath the sea, in freezing cold water, for
months at a time? A submarine is a completely sealed environment. The
nuclear engine provides warmth and generates electricityand the
electricity powers all the life-support systems that submariners need. It
makes oxygen for people to breathe using electrolysis to chemically
separate molecules of water (turning H2O into H2 and O2) and it scrubs
unwanted carbon dioxide from the air. Subs can even make their own drinking
water from seawater using electricity to remove the salt. Trash is
compacted into steel cans, which are ejected from an airlock system (a
watertight exit in the hull) and dumped on the seabed.
Who invented the submarine?

USS Holland Submarine Torpedo Boat underway

Photo: The USS Holland (Submarine Torpedo Boat # 1) underway, circa 1900.
Photo by courtesy of Naval Historical Center.

1620: Englishman Cornelis Drebble (15721633) built the first submarine by

waterproofing a wooden, egg-shaped boat with leather and coating the whole
thing in wax. Scientists are uncertain whether Drebble's boat ever set sail.
1776: During the US revolution, David Bushnell (17421824) built a handpowered one-person submarine called the Turtle to help attack British warships.
1800: American steam engineer Robert Fulton (17651815) designed a
convertible ship with folding-down sails that could turn itself into a submarine for
traveling underwater.
1897: American inventor Simon Lake (18661945) launched the Argonaut, the
first submarine to operate in the open sea.
1900: The US Navy launched its first ever submarine, the USS Holland, named for
its Irish-American inventor John Holland (18401914). Although Holland had
offered submarines to the Navy for years beforehand, it had originally shown no
interest.
1914-18: During World War I, the German navy operated a fleet of highly
effective military submarines called U-boats (short for Unterseeboot, which
means underwater ship). In the 1930s, the Germans started using snorkel tubes
(invented by a Dutch engineer) to supply air to their U-boat's diesel-electric
engines, giving them greater range and effectiveness.
1955: The US Navy launched the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered
submarine.

http://marinebio.org/oceans/submarines/
Because both were dangerous, steam and gasoline engines were phased
out for less-volatile diesel engines. In 1904, the French became the first to
build a submarine Aigrette, which used a diesel engine on surface and an electric
engine while underwater. The U.S. followed the trend building its first dieselpowered sub, the F-class Skipjack, in 1911. The diesel engine supplied
steam, which turned turbines to produce the electricity to heat, light
and power the sub. These diesel engines burned oil instead of gas so they had
less toxic fumes, were more economical and did not use a complicated sparking
system. However, diesel engines could not be used underwater because
they needed air for combustion and did produced some toxic fumes.
Instead, electric batteries were used when a submarine was underwater.

In 1954, the U.S. commissioned the first nuclear-powered submarine, the

USS Nautilus. Because nuclear-powered engines required no air, the
submarine could stay submerged indefinitely, surfacing only when in need of
supplies. The Nautilus could travel at speeds of 23 knots surfaced and
submerged.

A nuclear-powered engine works because heat is generated by the

fissioning of the nuclear fuel. Two systems of pressurized water are sent
through the nuclear engine. The first, or primary, system circulates water
through the reactor, piping loops, pumps and finally to the steam generators,
where the heat from the reactor is transferred to the secondary water

system. The water from the primary system is then directed back to the
reactor to be heated again. The heat transferred to the secondary system
creates steam. This steam supplies the ship with electricity and
propulsion when it moves through the turbine generators and
propulsion turbines, respectively. The steam, condensed back to water,
returns to the steam generators to be reheated.
http://www.explainthatstuff.com/how-propellers-work.html

Why airplane and ship propellers work differently

Airplane propellers (sometimes referred to as "airscrews," especially

historically and in Britain) have thick and narrow blades that turn at high
speed, whereas ship propellers have thinner, broader blades that spin
more slowly. Although the basic theory is the same, plane and ship propellers
are optimized for very different speeds in very different fluidsfaster in air,
slower in waterand a propeller that works well in one isn't necessarily going to
work as well (or at all) in the other.

Chart: You might think ship propellers are always bigger than plane
propellers, but that's not really true, as this chart shows. I've picked five
examples of marine propellers (dark blue) and five aircraft propellers (light blue)
for comparison. The smallest real propellers you're likely to find are the ones on
outboard motors; the biggest are the rotors on large aircraft like the Bell Boeing
Osprey. Perhaps surprisingly, even giant ships don't have propellers quite as big
as the ones on the Osprey. As a general rule, however, the bigger the ship or
plane, the bigger the propeller (or propellers) it needs.

It's easy to see why there's a difference if we go back to Newton's third law.
The simplest way to think of a propeller is as a device that moves a vehicle
forward by pushing air or water backward. The force on the backward-moving
fluid is equal to the force on the forward-moving vehicle. Now force is also the
rate at which something's momentum changes, so we can also see a propeller
as a device that gives a ship or a plane forward momentum by giving air
or water an equal amount of backward momentum. Sea water is about
1000 times more dense than air (at sea level), so you need to move much
more air than water to produce a similar change in momentum.

That's one reason why airplane propellers turn much faster than ship
propellers. Another reason is that airplanes generally need to go fast to fly (lift
produced by the movement of fast air over the wings is what balances the force
of gravity and holds them in the sky), whereas ships don't: buoyancy lets them
float whether they move or not. While planes travel entirely through air,
remember that ships operate at the tricky interface between the oceans and the
atmosphere where waves make life complicated; submarines, which operate
mostly underwater, have an easier time in calmer water. Ships have
powerful diesel engines that rotate at high speed, so their propellers

could easily turn as fast as airplane propellers if that were what we wanted. In
practice, propellers work most efficiently in water at slower speeds, so a
ship has a gearbox that transforms power from the fast-turning engine
down to much lower speeds in the propeller.

http://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/eng/reactor.html
Nuclear Propulsion

A nuclear-powered ship is constructed with the nuclear power plant inside a

section of the ship cded the reactor compartment. The components of the
nuclear power plant include a high-strength steel reactor vessel, heat
exchanger(s) (steam generator), and associated piping, pumps, and valves. Each
reactor plant contains over 100 tons of lead shielding, part of which is made
radioactive by contact with radioactive material or by neutron activation of
impurities in the lead.

The propulsion plant of a nuclear-powered ship or submarine uses a

nuclear reactor to generate heat. The heat comes from the fissioning of
nuclear fuel contained within the reactor. Since the fisioning process also
produces radiation, shields are placed around the reactor so that the crew is
protected.

The nuclear propulsion plant uses a pressurized water reactor design which
has two basic systems - a primary system and a secondary system. The
primary system circulates ordinary water and consists of the reactor, piping
loops, pumps and steam generators. The heat produced in the reactor is
transferred to the water under high pressure so it does not boil. This water is
pumped through the steam generators and back into the reactor for re-heating.

In the steam generators, the heat from the water in the primary system is
transferred to the secondary system to create steam. The secondary system is
isolated from the primary system so that the water in the two systems does not
intermix.

In the secondary system, the steam flows from the steam generators to drive
the turbine generators, which supply the ship with electricity, and to the main
propulsion turbines, which drive the propeller. After passing through the turbines,
the steam is condensed into water which is fed back to the steam generators by
the feed pumps. Thus, both the primary and secondary systems are closed
systems where water is recirculated and renewed.

Since there is no step in the generation of this power which requires the
presence of air or oxygen, this allows the ship to operate completely
independent from the earths atmosphere for extended periods of time.