Powering a Submarine with Rubber Bands
A look underneath the water’s surface can be fun and informative! However, making a device to go under the surface poses challenges with communication and water proofing. That’s what this rubber band powered submarine by [PeterSripol] attempts to fix!
The greatest challenge of building such a submersible was the active depth control system. The submarine is slightly negatively buoyant so that once the band power runs out, it returns to the surface. Diving is controlled by pitch fins, which will pitch downward under the torque applied by the rubber bands. Once the rubber band power runs out, elastic returns the fins to their natural pitch up position encouraging surfacing of the submarine. However, this results in uncontrolled dives and risks loss of the submersible.
Therefore, a float to deflect the fins when a certain depth was reached. Yet this proved ineffective, so a final solution of electronic depth control was implemented. While this may not be in the spirit of a rubber band powered submarine, it is technically still rubber band powered.
After a prototype with a single rubber band holder, a second version which uses a gearbox and three rubber band inputs was implemented which provides approximately 10 minutes of run time. An electronic failure resulted in the submarine’s failure of its final wild test, but the project was nonetheless a fun look at elastic powering a submersible.
This is not the first time we have looked at strange rubber band powered vehicles. Make sure to check out this rubber band powered airplane next!
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