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Professor Richard Woytowich is Guest Speaker on Sinking of RMS Titanic at Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers Dinner
Professor Richard Woytowich
City Tech Computer Engineering Technology Professor Richard Woytowich presented a paper, "Riveted Hull Joint Design in RMS Titanic and Other Pre-WWI Ships," at the Past Chairman's Night Dinner of The New York Metropolitan Section of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers in October. Based on his research over the past several years on the sinking of the British luxury liner in 1912 and beginning with an overview of riveted joint construction, the paper shows that the efficiency of riveted joints in pre-WWI ships decreased as plate thickness increased.
In the case of the Titanic, some of the joints involved in the iceberg impact were only about 27 percent as strong as the plates they connected. Woytowich used a finite element model to show how such a joint would respond to the sort of out-of-plane load the iceberg would have applied. The ship was doomed when the impact of its collision with an iceberg caused rivet heads to pop and hull plates to separate. While the total breach in the ship's underwater hull was only about 12 square feet -- the surface area of a human being of average size -- this allowed seven tons of water per second to flood the ship in the time it remained afloat. The extra weight was more than its structure could tolerate.
A feature article by Woytowich on the failure of the ship's riveted joints will appear in the spring 2003 issue of Connections, the College's constituent magazine. Woytowich is a member of the Marine Forensics Analysis Panel that recently completed a lengthy investigation into why the Titanic sank.
Photo Credit: Dominick Sarica
