TITANICA Night to Remember

A night to rememberOn the moonless night of April 14, the ocean

was very calm and still. At 11:40 p.m., Greenland time, the lookouts in the crow's nest sighted an iceberg immediately ahead of the ship; the bridge was alerted. The duty officer ordered the ship hard to port and the engines reversed. In about 40 seconds, as the Titanic was beginning to respond to the change in course, it collided with an iceberg estimated to have a gross weight of 150,000-300,000 tons.

A night to rememberThe iceberg struck the Titanic near the bow

on the starboard (right) side about 4 m above the keel. During the next 10 seconds, the iceberg raked the starboard side of the ship's hull for about 100 m, damaging the hull plates and popping rivets, thus opening the first six of the 16 watertight compartments formed by the transverse bulkheads. At 2:20 a.m., April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

Whose fault was it?This was Captain E.J. Smith's retirement trip. All he had to do was get to New York in record time. Captain E.J. Smith said years before the Titanic's voyage,"I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.”

Whose fault was it?Captain Smith ignored seven iceberg

warnings from his crew and other ships. If he had called for the ship to slow down then maybe the Titanic disaster would not have happened.

It was Bruce Ismay’s faultBruce Ismay was the managing director of the White Star Line and he was aboard the Titanic. Competition for Atlantic passengers was fierce and the White Star Line wanted to show that they could make a six-day crossing.To meet this schedule the Titanic could not afford to slow down. It is believed that Ismay put pressure on Captain Smith to maintain the speed of the ship.

Ship speedThe ship continued at a speed of about 21.5

knots. Each ship had three propellersEach outboard propeller was driven by a

separate four-cylinder, triple expansion, reciprocating steam engine.

The center propeller was driven by a low-pressure steam turbine using the exhaust steam from the two reciprocating engines.

The power plant was rated at 51,000 I.H.P.

Ship SpeedTo provide the necessary steam for the power

plant, 29 boilers were available, fired by 159 furnaces.

Coal was burned as fuel at a rate of 650 tons per day when the ship was underway. Stokers moved the coal from the bunkers into the furnaces by hand. The bunkers held enough coal for a ten-day voyage.

It was Thomas Andrews' faultThe belief that the ship was

unsinkable was, in part, due to the fact that the Titanic had sixteen watertight compartments. However, the compartments did not reach as high as they should have done. The White Star Line did not want them to go all the way up because this would have reduced living space in first class. If Mr Andrews, the ship's architect, had insisted on making them the correct height then maybe the Titanic would not have sunk.

Design Correct height of the water tight

compartments.One of Titanic's greatest innovations was the

placement of fifteen watertight bulkheads (with electrically operated watertight doors) that extended from the ship's double bottom through four or five of her nine decks and were said to make the ship "unsinkable."

Bulkheads It separates one compartment on a ship from

an adjacent compartment. Bulkheads, decks and overheads define

compartments. If you are a landlubber, you'd call a bulkhead a wall.

Other kinds of partition elements within a ship are decks and deckheads.

BulkheadsBulkheads in a ship serve several purposes:increase the structural rigidity of the vessel, divide functional areas into rooms and create watertight compartments that can

contain water in the case of a hull breach or other leak.

Bulkheads

Water-tight Bulk-headsThese type of bulkheads are used nowadays in

all most all types of ships. They provide maximum safety in times of

flooding or damage of hull. They divide the ship into watertight

compartments which prevents seeping of water to other parts of the ship incase the hull is broken.

The number of compartments that a particular ship has depends on the type and requirement of the vessel.

It was Captain Lord's Fault

The final iceberg warning sent to Titanic was from the Californian. Captained by Stanley Lord, she had stopped for the night about 19 miles north of Titanic. At around 11.15, Californian's radio operator turned off the radio and went to bed. Sometime after midnight the crew on watch reported seeing rockets being fired into the sky from a big liner. Captain Lord was informed but it was concluded that the ship was having a party. No action was taken by the Californian. If the Californian had turned on the radio she would have heard the distress messages from Titanic and would have been able to reach the ship in time to save all passengers

It was the ship builder’s fault-THE CONSTRUCTION269.1 meters long, 28.2 meters maximum

wide, and 18 meters tall from the water line to the boat deck.

a gross weight of 46,000 tons.The steel plate from the hull of the Titanic

was nominally 1.875 cm thick.while the bulkhead plate had a thickness of

1.25 cm.

Luxury & StyleThe first on-board swimming poolsa gymnasium that included an electric horse

and an electric camel, a squash court, a number of rowing machines, and stationary bicycles, all supervised by a staff of professional instructors.

Luxury & StyleThe public rooms for the first-class

passengers were large and elegantly furnished with wood paneling, stained-glass windows, comfortable lounge furniture, and expensive carpets.

The decor of the first class cabins, in addition to being luxurious, differed in style from cabin to cabin. As an extra feature on the Titanic, the Café Parisienne offered superb cuisine.

Material UsedSiemens-Martin formula steel plating

throughout the shell and upper works.This steel was high quality with good elastic

properties, ideal for conventional riveting as well as the modern method (in 1912) of hydraulic riveting.

Each plate was milled and rolled to exact tolerances and presented a huge material cost to both yard and ship owner.

Material UsedA very low nitrogen content.high oxygen and low silicon content means

that the steel has only been partially deoxidized.

a low manganese content. This yielded a Mn:S ratio of 6.8:1—a very low ratio by modern standards

The presence of relatively high amounts of phosphorous, oxygen, and sulfur has a tendency to embrittle the steel at low temperatures.

Material UsedComparing the composition of the Titanic

steel and ASTM A36 steel shows that the modern steel has a higher manganese content and lower sulfur content, yielding a higher Mn:S ratio that reduced the ductile-brittle transition temperature substantially.

Material UsedThe strength was entirely provided by the ship's

shell plating and rivets. Hydraulic riveting was used for much of the 3 million rivets.

Titanic's impact with an iceberg caused the rippling and springing of the joints between plates.

for steel of this quality to fracture due to cold and impact would mean the steel being brought down to below the temperature of liquid nitrogen. As the water in Titanic's ballast tanks had not frozen on the night she struck the iceberg, it's safe to say the steel was above the freezing point of ordinary seawater.

Titanic RivetsDr. Foecke analyzed the two Titanic hull

rivets, cutting them in half and probing their composition with tools like microscopes and image analyzers. His work revealed an overabundance of slag, the glassy residue left over from the smelting of metallic ores.

He was surprised when his inquiry disclosed 9.3 percent slag in one rivet and similar levels in the other. By contrast, modern wrought iron has a slag content of 2 percent or 3 percent.

Titanic RivetsComplicating the picture, Dr. Foecke found

that the slag of the Titanic rivets was very coarsely distributed, creating lines of weakness. Most surprising, its grain changed abruptly just before the area where the ends popped off, turning perpendicular to the axis grain and suggesting an area of major weakness.

Slag grain near the hammered end abruptly turns perpendicular to the axis, suggesting an area of major weakness. Slag grain in the rivet's center runs parallel to the axis.

Titanic Rivetsthree times the expected amount of silicate slag

was found; silicate is an impurity used to strengthen steel at concentrations of 2% to 3%, though at higher concentration silicate will weaken the material, which was the case. In addition to the samples having an unusual high concentration of slag, the rivets were not processed properly. The slag usually forms long fibres that run along the length of the rivet. The rivets used in the construction of the Titanic had horizontal slag at either end of the rivet, thus, making it easy to pull apart.