The Titanic Research Paper

The engineering part.
A great design, a revolution in ship industry “the Titanic” was the best in its time as people thought. What the public did not know was that the engineers did not imagine the worst collision scenario that might happen when they called it the unsinkable ship. The unsinkable ship sank on its maiden voyage; the main design flaw that the Titanic had was the design of the watertight compartments which should keep the ship floating in normal conditions. Engineers when thinking about ship collisions they imagine all the damage and forces acting, during that collision, on the horizontal axis. This narrows their thinking and creativity in making the ship safer because they neglect an important factor which may lead the ship to …show more content…
That many of watertight compartments to be filled as a result of an accident was far away from the imagination of any engineer who worked on the design of the ship. On the other hand, the damage caused by the iceberg exceeded the ship’s maximum acceptable damage therefore it directly started sinking. The fact that six compartments were leaking water at the same time irrupted the balance of the ship and the front part of the ship started to sink. Until now the design flaw did not affect the process of sinking, neither increased it nor decreased it. Although, the steel used did, it broke instead of bending and allowed that much halls in the hull. Here the engineering error comes; the watertight compartments were only horizontally affecting. Instead of having closed rooms to keep the ship afloat the hall area considered for that was connected, it had walls which divided that space to sixteen sections [3]; those walls did not reach the ceiling. For that reason, the more the ship sank the more it tilted, when that happened the sea water level became higher than the top of the ceiling protecting the next “watertight compartment,” if we can call it this way after knowing the engineering mistake. That continued and the water kept moving to the next volume after filling the first …show more content…
Did that really happen? If yes; why did that happen? As shown in the previous figure, part of the ship hull was filled with water that part was sinking. In contrast, the part which was not filled with water helped keeping the ship afloat, but at the same time was held in the air by the part in the water, see the figure below to understand how the forces acted in a better way. That started tension forces on the ship structure, especially on the vertical part of the ship which was separating the water filled part and the other part. Another point that should be kept in mind is that that vertical part was changing as water continued filling the “watertight compartments”. These forces started bending the ship at that part. What really happened and the way the ship was bent is still not so clear. Scientists at the beginning thought that it just broke into halves, after a while they discovered that it was a process of bending and shrinking not just breaking at once, that was discovered after diving and filming the ship and analyzing how the edges of the two halves looked like. The steel played another role over here. It for sure fractured quicker than a steel that would meet the requirements of today’s ships; and that broke the ship faster and led to less sinking