What kind of ship was titanic

If it had been five compartments, with the Carpathia only six hours away, she would have stayed afloat long enough for most people to have been rescued. If four compartments had flooded, she might have even limped into Halifax. We do not suggest that the ship would not have sustained significant damage in the collision if she had been built differently, but rather she would have sunk more slowly.

And with the shortage of lifeboats, the time she spent afloat made all the difference in the tragedy. Full details of this analysis, as well as other myth debunking, and a description of the ultimate fate of the wreck site can be found in What Really Sank The Titanic - New Forensic Discoveries Citadel Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. A novel metal-organic framework coating for electronic devices can release water vapor to dissipate the heat these devices generate.

Our website uses cookies Cookies enable us to provide the best experience possible and help us understand how visitors use our website. Okay, I understand Learn more. Home » Metals and alloys » News » What really sank the Titanic? What really sank the Titanic? What information about Titanic and her sinking is available for such an investigation? Comment now. New coating helps phones stay cool by sweating A novel metal-organic framework coating for electronic devices can release water vapor to dissipate the heat these devices generate.

In , White Star Line's managing director J. The first two were to be named Olympic and Titanic , the latter name chosen by Ismay to convey a sense of overwhelming size and strength.

The third would be Britannic. It took a year to design the first two ships. Construction of Olympic started in December , followed by Titanic in March During the two years it took to complete Titanic 's hull, publicity about the ship's magnificence made Titanic a legend before its first cruise. The "launch" of the completed steel hull on May 31, was heavily publicized. The ship was then "fitted out," which involved construction of the ship's many facilities and systems, its elaborate woodwork, and elegant decor.

Titanic 's maiden voyage was delayed from March 20 to April The Titanic was a massive ship— feet long, 92 feet wide, and displacing or weighing 52, long tons a long ton is pounds.

It was feet tall from the keel to the top of the four stacks or funnels, almost 35 feet of which was below the waterline. The Titanic was taller above the water than most urban buildings of the time. At the time, Titanic was the largest ever movable man-made object. While the ship itself was massive, it was also designed to be a symbol of modern safety technology.

It had a double-hull of 1-inch thick steel plates and 16 water-tight compartments sealed by massive doors that could be instantly triggered by a single electric switch on the bridge, or automatically by electric water-sensors.

The original design called for 32 lifeboats, but White Star Line thought the boat-deck would look cluttered and reduced the number to 16, for a total lifeboat capacity of 1, This capacity exceeded the current regulations requiring space for , even though Titanic was capable of carrying some 3, passengers and crew.

The maiden voyage of the Titanic had more than 2, passengers and crew aboard. The press labeled the ship "unsinkable. The accommodations aboard the Titanic were considered the most modern and luxurious on any ocean, and included electric light and heat in every room, electric elevators, a swimming pool, a squash court, a Turkish bath, a gymnasium with a mechanical horse and camel to keep riders fit, and staterooms and first-class facilities to rival the best hotels.

First-class passengers could glide down a six-story, glass-domed grand staircase to enjoy the finest cuisine in the first-class dining saloon that spanned the width of the ship. The liner had two musical ensembles, rather than the standard one, and two libraries, first- and second-class. Even the third-class, or steerage, cabins were more luxurious than the first-class cabins on other steamships, and boasted amenities like indoor toilet facilities that some of Titanic 's emigrant passengers had not enjoyed in their own homes.

The journey began at Southampton, England, at noon on April 10, By nightfall, Titanic had stopped in Cherbourg, France, to pick up additional passengers. The winter of had been unusually mild, and unprecedented amounts of ice had broken loose from the arctic regions. Titanic was equipped with Marconi's new wireless telegraph system and the two Marconi operators kept the wireless room running 24 hours a day. On Sunday, April 14, the fifth day at sea, Titanic received five different ice-warnings, but Captain Edward Smith was not overly concerned.

Bruce Ismay hoped to arrive in New York a day ahead of schedule. Similar behavior was found in the damaged hull steel of the Titanic's sister ship, Olympic, after a collision while leaving harbor on September 20, A foot high opening was torn into the starboard side of the Olympic's hull when a British cruiser broadsided her.

Failure of the riveted joints and ripping of the hull plates were apparent in the area of impact. However, the plate tears exhibited little plastic deformation and the edges were unusually sharp, having the appearance of brittle fractures [Garzke and others, ]. Further evidence of the brittle fracture of the hull steel was found when a cigarette-sized coupon of the steel taken from the Titanic wreck was subjected to a Charpy test.

Used to measure the brittleness of a material, the Charpy test is run by holding the coupon against a steel backing and striking the coupon with a 67 pound pendulum on a 2. The pendulum's point of contact is instrumented, with a readout of forces electronically recorded in millisecond detail.

A piece of modern high-quality steel was tested along with the coupon from the hull steel. When the coupon of the modern steel was tested, the pendulum swung down and halted with a thud; the test piece had bent into a "V. Pictures of the two coupons following the Charpy test are shown in Figure 1. What the test showed, and the readout confirmed, is the brittleness of the Titanic's hull steel.

When the Titanic struck the iceberg, the hull plates did not deform. They fractured. Figure 1. Results of the Charpy test for modern steel and Titanic steel [Gannon, ]. When a pendulum struck the modern steel, on the left, with a large force, the sample bent without breaking into pieces; it was ductile.

Under the same impact loading, the Titanic steel, on the right, was extremely brittle; it broke in two pieces with little deformation. A microstructural analysis of the Titanic steel also showed the plausibility of brittle fracture of the hull steel. The test showed high levels of both oxygen and sulphur, which implies that the steel was semi-kilned low carbon steel, made using the open-hearth process.

High sulphur content increases the brittleness of steel by disrupting the grain structure The sulphur combines with magnesium in the steel to form stringers of magnesium sulphide, which act as "highways" for crack propagation. Although most of the steel used for shipbuilding in the early s had a relatively high sulphur content, the Titanic's steel was high even for the times [Hill, ].

The Rivets. The wrought iron rivets that fastened the hull plates to the Titanic's main structure also failed because of brittle fracture from the high impact loading of the collision with the iceberg and the low temperature water on the night of the disaster.

Figure 2 shows the Titanic during her construction, with the riveted hull plates of her stern visible. With the ship travelling at nearly 25 mph, the contact with the iceberg was probably a series of impacts that caused the rivets to fail either in shear or by elongation [Garzke and others, ].

As the iceberg scraped along sections of the Titanic's hull, the rivets were sheared off, which opened up riveted seams. Also, because of the tremendous forces created on impact with the iceberg, the rivet heads in the areas of contact were simply popped off, which caused more seams to open up.

Normally, the rivets would have deformed before failing because of their ductility, but with water temperatures below freezing, the rivets had become extremely brittle. Figure 2. The Titanic in the shipyard during her construction [Refrigerator, ].

Note the hull plates, fastened on all sides to the ship's main structure by thousands of rivets. When the iceberg tore through the hull plates, huge holes were created that allowed water to flood the hull of the ship. As a result, rivets not in the area of contact with the iceberg were also subjected to incredible forces.

Like a giant lever, the hull plates transferred the inward forces, applied to the edges of the cracked plates by the water rushing into the hull, to the rivets along the plate seams. The rivets were then either elongated or snapped in two, which broke the caulking along the seams and provided another inlet for water to flood the ship.

Design Flaws Along with the material failures, poor design of the watertight compartments in the Titanic's lower section was a factor in the disaster.

The lower section of the Titanic was divided into sixteen major watertight compartments that could easily be sealed off if part of the hull was punctured and leaking water. After the collision with the iceberg, the hull portion of six of these sixteen compartments was damaged, as shown in Figure 3. Sealing off the compartments was completed immediately after the damage was realized, but as the bow of the ship began to pitch forward from the weight of the water in that area of the ship, the water in some of the compartments began to spill over into adjacent compartments.

Although the compartments were called watertight, they were actually only watertight horizontally; their tops were open and the walls extended only a few feet above the waterline [Hill, ]. If the transverse bulkheads the walls of the watertight compartments that are positioned across the width of the ship had been a few feet taller, the water would have been better contained within the damaged compartments.

Consequently, the sinking would have been slowed, possibly allowing enough time for nearby ships to help. However, because of the extensive flooding of the bow compartments and the subsequent flooding of the entire ship, the Titanic was gradually pulled below the waterline.

Figure 3. A layout of the watertight compartments and the damage from the collision [Refrigerator, ]. The thick black lines below the waterline indicate the approximate locations of the damage to the hull.

The watertight compartments were useless to countering the damage done by the collision with the iceberg. Some of the scientists studying the disaster have even concluded that the watertight compartments contributed to the disaster by keeping the flood waters in the bow of the ship. If there had been no compartments at all, the incoming water would have spread out, and the Titanic would have remained horizontal.

Eventually, the ship would have sunk, but she would have remained afloat for another six hours before foundering [Gannon, ]. This amount of time would have been sufficient for nearby ships to reach the Titanic's location so all of her passengers and crew could have been saved.

Effects of the Disaster In an effort to prevent repeating their mistakes, the White Star Line modified several of their existing ships following the Titanic disaster. The changes were based on the design flaws that were assumed to have contributed to the disaster. Along with these design changes, the White Star Line, and all shipbuilding companies at the time, had newly established safety regulations, agreed upon by both the British and American governments, that they had to follow.

Developing safety regulations for ships at sea was another attempt to avoid accidents similar to the Titanic. The following is a discussion of the changes made in the design of ships and the safety regulations implemented as a result of the Titanic disaster. Ship Design Following the Titanic disaster, the White Star Line modified the design of the Titanic's sister ships in two ways: the double bottoms were extended up the sides of the hull and the transverse bulkheads of the watertight compartments were raised.

The double bottom on ships is constructed by taking two layers of steel that span the length of the ship and separating them by five feet of space [Garzke and others, ]. When a ship runs aground or strikes something in the water, the bottom plate of the hull can be punctured without damage incurred to the top plate. With a double bottom, the chance that a punctured hull would allow water into the watertight compartments is minimized.

By extending the double bottoms up the sides of the hull, which adds another layer of steel to the sides of the ship, a similar event can be prevented. If an iceberg, or a collision with another ship, barely punctures the hull, only the space between the inner and outer sidewalls would flood with water. The watertight compartments would remain undamaged. The ends of the transverse bulkheads of the watertight compartments were raised to prevent a tragedy similar to the Titanic.

When the hull of the Titanic was torn open in the collision with the iceberg, water began to flood the damaged compartments in the bow.

As the ship pitched forward under the weight of the water in the bow compartments, water began to spill over the tops of the bulkheads into adjacent, undamaged compartments. Although called watertight, the watertight compartments were actually only watertight horizontally; their tops were open and the walls extended only a few feet above the waterline.

By raising the ends of the transverse bulkheads, if a ship were taking in water through the bow compartments and the ship began to pitch forward, the water in the compartments could not flow over the tops of the bulkheads into the next compartments.

As a result, flooding of the damaged compartments could be controlled and isolated to only the damaged sections [Gannon, ]. At the Convention on Safety of Life at Sea, specifications for the orientation, length, and number of watertight compartments in passenger ships were established. The watertight compartments, which improve a ship's ability to withstand the effects of underwater damage, are used to control flooding in the hull of the ship.

To maintain a nearly level position, the walls of the watertight compartments are to be oriented horizontally, or across the width of the ship, rather than vertically. If one side of the hull is damaged, the water that fills the hull will even out across the width of the ship.

With vertical walls, the water in the hull would remain on the damaged side of the ship, causing the ship to lean to that side. The length of the watertight compartments is determined by the length of the ship. Shorter ships should have shorter compartments while longer ships should have longer compartments.