Structural Weakness And The Hull Of The Titanic

The maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic will always be a day marked in history as a night to remember. Why did the Titanic not make it to her port in New York City from her trek across the Atlantic Ocean? The Titanic was designed to take passengers from England, France and Ireland to North America (Gunner). What happened that night the Titanic sank down to her cold watery grave to the bottom North Atlantic? Was it from the design of the ship or perhaps from poor building materials, human naivety and error; or simply a combination of all of these things? The Titanic’s sinking was a combination of all these things but mostly from human naivety and error with their belief of the ship to be unsinkable.

Jagged and sharp, the edges of the piece of steel appeared almost shattered, like broken china. Also, the metal showed no evidence bending or deformation. Typical high-quality ship steel is more ductile and deforms rather than breaks. A microstructural analysis of the Titanic steel also showed the plausibility of brittle fracture of the hull

The British luxury passenger ship, The Titanic, set sail on April 10, 1912, en route to New York City from Southampton (Lord ch 1). During her maiden voyage, midnight of April 15, 1912, she began to sink (ch 1). The Titanic had a collision with an iceberg that was around 100 feet tall (“Titanic: 40 Fascinating Facts” 3). Regardless to how greatly manufactured the Titanic was, and with beliefs that she was unsinkable, the miscalculation of human error proves that every possible outcome cannot be prevented, disasters can still occur regardless of careful planning.

On April 30, 1907, Bruce Ismay and William James Pirrie had an idea to build a ship, the Titanic. “Harland and Wolff of Belfast, Ireland built the ship,” (United States). Within a few days short of five years, the Titanic was then ready to set sail from Belfast to Southampton. There were 2,223 passengers on board making their way to a better life. The Titanic made it to Southampton the next day, and then set sail for New York. The Titanic gave many people a chance to start a new life in America, and it was known as “The Ship of Dreams”. The ship consisted of millionaires all the way down to immigrants. This dream ship was also said to be unsinkable, however, this story is something that literally went down in history. Many sources state that the cause of the Titanic’s demise on April 14, 1912, was due to a variety of causes such as, the way the rivets were placed, the airtight rooms were not airtight, there were not enough lifeboats for the number of passengers present, Captain Smith avoided iceberg warnings, and the weather that night was a major problem altogether. Each of these played a key role in the tragic downfall of the White Star Liner ship, the Titanic, but the rivets and construction of the ship were the main issues at fault.

Since the catastrophic night of the sinking of the Titanic, the ship had been unfounded for about seven decades. Nearly 12,460 feet deep in the ocean, a team of people from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found the Titanic in September of 1985 (Brewster & Coulter). The ship was split into two, despite popular belief that the Titanic had sank in one piece (Brewster & Coulter, 1998). If anyone were to try to raise part of the 60 foot buried Titanic, it would fall apart (Brewster & Coulter, 1998). After 73 long years, the mystery of the

I am coming to you over 100 years ahead in time, and I have come to tell you that the Titanic cruise ship you are about to aboard is very much unsafe. The author that posted this information is Vicki Bassett. The purpose of my letter is to inform your family of the design flaws of the Titanic so you don’t die. I have seen the death toll, about 1500 people died on the Titanic the night of the disaster. Only 700 survive, and your family is not a part of that. The hull steel, failed rivets, and there were also flaws in the watertight compartments of the Titanic. The Titanic suffered from several detrimental flaws right before it had even set sail! You should completely eliminate the Titanic from your calendar and schedule a vacation somewhere else because if you go on the Titanic you are walking into a death trap.

The Titanic’s maiden voyage was disastrous because the beautiful ship sank and many people died. One of the largest flaws of the Titanic’s design is that it was too big and not nimble enough to avoid the iceberg. In addition to the nimbility of the ship, some of the rivets were improperly manufactured and contained a lot of slag in the steel, which makes it more fracture prone.

“The ship had watertight compartments that would allow her to float indefinitely” According to Robert Ballard in Exploring The Titanic. Although, this accusation was unfortunately far from the truth. These compartments quickly filled and abolished the idea of “watertight”, like domino's they flooded one after another The question then is: Who is responsible for the Titanic's sinking that sent 1,500 innocent people to a watery grave?. The consequences of Bruce Ismay and Thomas Andrews faulty design may have been the downfall of this “Unsinkable” ship.

This would have strengthened the bow stern and although we are uncertain whether this may have stopped the ship from sinking, it would have at least stopped the ship from sinking as fast as it did. However we learnt a lot from the failure of the Titanic and because of this failure the maritime industry has changed the testing criteria of things such as metal plates and rivets. Materials must now pass a series of tests such as the Charpy test and other rigorous tensile tests. Tensile tests conducted in different conditions to show whether the material can cope with a series of different environments. Improvements in design of ships have also come about as a result of the Titanic; double-sided hulls were added to ships to prevent minor hull punctures such as the tears on the Titanic from causing major damage. Furthermore with the development of the metal welding industry, the need for rivets in applications such

The high percentage made them weak and fracture-prone so when they collided with the iceberg hit they popped and allowed the plates to separate and let in water. In a 2008 article, also by New York Times,  Jennifer McCarty, co-author of What Really Sank the Titanic (along with Timothy Foecke), stated “The company knowingly purchased weaker rivets…” In an analysis later made by Dr. Timothy Foecke, a scientist at the National Institute of Standard and Technology, he proved the rivets to be faulty and may be accountable for the six tears that were discovered in the ship’s lower bow.  With a such a ‘top notch’ ship, it became questionable on why the rivets were so easy to break and the answer laid within the construction of the

"Come see the unsinkable ship!” the townspeople cried out. They were, of course, talking about the White Star Line’s newest vessel, the Titanic. At eight hundred eighty-three feet long and ninety-two feet wide, the Titanic’s first voyage was packed full, starboard to port, with two thousand, two hundred, twenty-eight people on board. There were three hundred thirty-seven people in first class, two hundred eighty-five in second class, seven hundred twenty-one people in third class, and eight hundred eighty-five crew members. Even without the people, the Titanic weighed 46,328 tons. The vessel was one hundred and four feet in height and had twenty lifeboats. The architect, Thomas Andrews, was aboard the ship during its first and last catastrophic trans-Atlantic voyage.

Until now, scientists could only theorize what happened to cause the Titanic to break in half and sink as quickly as it did. Now, with actual pieces of Titanic, they have started to put the puzzle together. A puzzle that is disturbing in many ways, leading scientists to believe that sub-standard construction was, in part, to blame for Titanic’s demise. After careful inspection of the recovered hull the results were shocking. “Investigation of the steel used in the hull revealed that plates and rivets became brittle when exposed to low water temperature. On the night of the disaster, the water temperature was about (-2degrees C). In addition, the steel had a high sulfur content, which also made it more liable to fracture” (Adams 56). Steel that has higher sulfur content, according to experts, is caused by open hearth firing. This process cures the steel at a faster rate but causes it to become brittle. According to investigators today, the steel used on the Titanic was thought to be low grade. In a like manner, steel that is stressed is expected to bow outward, however the steel pieces that have been recovered are shattered. Another indication the steel used was low grade. Next, the original plans called for sixteen

In the conclusion, RMS Titanic used round headed solid rivets of iron and steel in the different locations of ship hull which were installed manually and some were hydraulically driven at different locations. The substandard material and the error in the placement of different type of rivets is the root cause of sinking of RMS Titanic after it hit the iceberg its hull collapsed and led to this disaster.

When analyzing this disaster the first thing to consider is the engineer’s design of the Titanic. The Titanic was employing many new and innovative designs that were believed to make the Titanic the safest ship ever built at that time. The engineer’s of the vessel made claims that the Titanic was “unsinkable” and that “even in the worst possible accident at sea, the ship should have stayed afloat for two to three days.” One of the features that lead them to this claim was the 16 watertight compartments in the hull of the ship. The way they were designed allowed for up to four compartments to be breached and they ship would still carry

The construction of the RMS Titanic started on March 31, 1909 in Belfast, North Ireland and cost $7.5 million. The man who designed it was a naval architect named Thomas Andrews. The ship was built to be the world’s largest passenger steamship, along with two other ships, the Olympic and Britanic. Although the ship has always been known to many as unsinkable, it was actually never supposed to be advertised like that. Extra measures were put into the ship to insure safety, for example, if four watertight compartments out of the 16 were flooded, the ship would still stay afloat. Even though all these precautions were made, who would have ever thought that a single iceberg could cause such a huge devastation.