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The Bath University Racing Submarine Team – Burst – recently came third in the European International Submarine Races hosted by defence firm QinetiQ in Hampshire. It was the first time a competition of this kind had been held outside the US.
The contest challenged teams of university students to design, build and race human-powered submarines against the clock on an out-and-back course. In the process the students developed strong engineering design capabilities and technical skills. The subs were flooded and piloted by one or two scuba divers, who had to provide all the propulsion during the race.
Burst’s leader, Dr William Megill from the Ocean Technologies Laboratory in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Bath, said: “I’ve been going to the American competition for years and this year we finally managed to get a UK-based contest off the ground. We had the six best teams attend – we like to think of ourselves as one of the best – including the two world leaders, Quebec and Florida, as well as Montreal, Michigan and Texas A&M University.”
The Bath team consisted of eight students, who have been working on their submarine throughout the final two years of their study at the university. This was only the fourth time the Burst team had taken part in an event of this kind, as Megill explained: “For our team it’s a relatively new thing. This year I let them use the hull that was raced last time but basically they start over again. The inside was ripped out and they rebuilt the mechanism and everything inside. Each year I stress to the students that they have to take ownership of the project, and that is exactly what they did.
“The machine that they built is a glass-fibre and cork composite, for which they won a prize in the US last year. The hull is a torpedo really but it is designed around fitting a pilot inside it.
“The volume of the craft is a little bit bigger than it needed to be but they wanted to make sure it didn’t roll over, so it’s got a lot of buoyancy in the top and a lot of weight in the bottom.
“Learning from what happened to this one last year, the students decided to gut the inside and change the propulsion system by putting in contra-rotating propellers, which made for a nice stable boat. The control system was a manual one as they didn’t quite have time to put in an automatic system, but it worked with two joysticks.
“The fins of the rudder and the dive planes on the back of the boat were biomimetic in the sense that the students drew their CAD model from measurements of a shark’s dorsal fin and built their glass-fibre and foam control surfaces from that. They did a lot of work on trying to streamline the outside of the boat this time and it did make a lot of difference for them.”
The team got off to a bit of a rocky start in testing because of a problem with the drive chain but that was soon overcome. This was all part of the test, though, as Megill stated: “The whole point of this kind of racing is all about reliability. For them to get out there, bond as a team and make it work, overcoming the little things that go wrong, provides an excellent lesson in engineering as they learn how to make it all work as a system. They also learn about fixing it under pressure, and develop a first-hand understanding of the importance of design for repair!”
The upgrade of the submarine, together with an indomitable team spirit, enabled the Bath competitors to achieve a highly creditable third place overall, finishing just behind two of the world leaders in the competition.
This pleased Megill, who commented: “There was no way they were ever going to catch the world leaders – Quebec and Florida are in a class of their own and the rest sort of follow on in the second division if you like. Our guys did themselves proud though as they finished really well in what was a tight group of other competitors.
“They fought their heart out over the course of the week. They did well on the design aspect and reporting and communicating on that part. We are proud of our team for that as they are engineers who can talk to people. They picked up the best presentation award, and it certainly isn’t for nothing that they won that as they communicate well and get their ways of thinking and solutions across to the audience. I was exceedingly proud of their performance.”
The hull of the Bath submarine was partly funded by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 2011. Megill was pleased to have IMechE backing once again: “This year we had the boat that the institution very kindly sponsored from last time, so we were able to build on the successes of that one,” he said.
“Then we are hoping that we can perhaps rely on the institution to support us again for the contest in Washington next year, as the guys are already designing the boat!”