Bill,
In my case I intend to use steel cylinders. I have enough positive buoyancy to deal with. I use an aluminum 80 for sport diving and have always found the change in buoyancy to be annoying, but manageable. A piston system would have to be quite massive with an interesting seal design, something I imagine like monster hydraulic heavy equipment.
As for the ballast system. there was a discussion here a while back about a bladder system that seemed to me to be workable for really deep diving submersibles. But, If I were going deep, I would take a real close look at what Hugo has in the JSL.
Chicken little here is staying so shallow, I'll be able to use small ambient trim tanks as "hard" tanks.
Joe
From: "Akins" <lakins1@tampabay.rr.com>
Reply-To: personal_submersibles@psubs.org
To: <personal_submersibles@psubs.org>
Subject: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Compressable ballast tanks
Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2006 05:51:42 -0500
Hi fellas.I was thinking about the variation in buoyancy in my aluminum scuba tanks. You know when your tank starts to get low on air howit becomes more buoyant. A thought struck me about how that might be counteracted that then led to another thought concerningballast tanks for a sub. With the scuba tank, I was thinking, what if it had a bottom that moved up and down the length of the tanklike a piston in an engine. As the tank emptied from my breathing, the bottom of the tank would be forced toward the top of the tankby the water pressure until the remaining pressure in the tank stopped it from moving. In this way the rest of the tank volume wouldnow be replaced by water and the tank wouldn't get more buoyant as it emptied. Of course you would have to have a very goodfoolproof seal. Even perhaps a seal that the tank's internal air pressure would push against to make the seal tightly seal. I wonderif anyone has ever tried making something like that? That was my first idea. Then that thought made me think about this. On my wetsubI've been planning to install 6 or 8 inch pipe about 4 feet long on either side for my soft ballast tanks. I had planned to use two scuba tanksto blow them and the scuba tanks would each be attached to the top of the pipes on either side of the sub providing plenty of air for boththe soft ballast pipes and also for the hard ballast bladders in the bow and stern. What I was thinking about was if I could use the same ideaas with the scuba tank moving bottom on my soft ballast tanks. Suspose I had a piston with a really good seal. Now I'm on the surfacewith the soft ballast pipes full volume keeping me up, then I could either crank the piston inward or even use hydraulics topush the piston inward. That would compress the air in the soft ballast pipe and lower its volume and I would submerge. Then when I wanted tosurface, I could crank the piston out, allowing the air to expand, the volume to increase again, and then I would surface. That way I wouldn't haveto use any air tanks to fill my soft ballast tanks. Sounds like it would work to me but I'd have to make the pipe smooth and have a tight fittingpiston with a really good seal on it. If the seal ever blew out I could use my hard ballast tanks and my own personal BCD and still get the sub to thesurface and I could also always bail out if I had to. Just a thought about the variable volume scuba tank and soft ballast tanks. What do youfellows think?Bill Akins.