Study on the pressure self-adaptive water-tight junction box in underwater vehicle

Abstract

Underwater vehicles play a very important role in underwater engineering. Water-tight junction box (WJB) is one of the key components in underwater vehicle. This paper puts forward a pressure self-adaptive water-tight junction box (PSAWJB) which improves the reliability of the WJB significantly by solving the sealing and pressure problems in conventional WJB design. By redundancy design method, the pressure self-adaptive equalizer (PSAE) is designed in such a way that it consists of a piston pressure-adaptive compensator (PPAC) and a titanium film pressureadaptive compensator (TFPAC). According to hydro-mechanical simulations, the operating volume of the PSAE is morethan or equal to 11.6 % of the volume of WJB liquid system. Furthermore, the required operating volume of the PSAE also increases as the gas content of oil, hydrostatic pressure or temperature difference increases. The reliability of the PSAWJB is proved by hyperbaric chamber tests.