Further to my last post, where I was using “Under Pressure” by Deepsea to work out the performance of materials for the main pressure vessel of my ROV. I am going to look at the performance of the Viewport Dome. Since the viewport needs to be optically clear this discounts metals like steel or aluminium. Glass is not a material that I really like the idea of using, this leaves clear plastic. 100 mm diameter acrylic domes are available on eBay. I already have one, and it’s about 3mm thick clear acrylic. I have already drilled the 20 M4 (4.2 mm) mounting holes.
Deep Sea’s Under Pressure can also do the same calculations on spheres and endcaps, one of the endcaps it supports is hemispherical endcaps (Domes). Plugging the numbers into the software gives the following results:
Under Pressure, tells me that the dome has a failure mode at 29 Bar which is about 300 meters, I don’t think I have accurate enough dimensions of the dome to feel that the simulation is able to be performed accurately. however, since I am unlikely to exceed 100 meters with my first attempt at building a remote control ROV, it is exceedingly unlikely that I will want to worry about the dome being a weak point in my pressure vessel.
In the next post, I will work through the rear endcap, and the penetrations for wires to pass through the rear endcap and into the pressure vessel without letting water in.
