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Cool Old Photo Of A Submarine Battery Bank.

A.Justice

Swears he didn't start that fire.
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Look at those exposed bus bars, I hope he's got a real good grip on that wrench (suction bulb).

Apparently this is from a WWII sub. Capacity is about 2.6 MWh. 126s, 2v per cell, 5320ah, X 2 sperate banks.
7c23c4a200775bad549c2ff1d7304fb6.jpg


Also found a cool photo of an oldschool "BMS" used onboard subs.
fig5-10.jpg
 
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Is that a wrench? Kind of looks like a turkey baster but it's hard to tell.

Imagine having to check the water levels in that thing.
 
looks like a:

Battery Electrolyte Tester​


Diesel - Battery subs are still being made. They are extremely silent running. Israel has several new versions of battery powered submarines that were built in Germany. They are hard to track.


 
Is that a wrench? Kind of looks like a turkey baster but it's hard to tell.

Imagine having to check the water levels in that thing.
I imagine there's so many cells that by the time you finish checking the last ones, it's time to go back and check the first again.
 
I imagine there's so many cells that by the time you finish checking the last ones, it's time to go back and check the first again.
I have a golf cart with six 8volt batteries.. That's 24 caps to remove, fill, and replace.. it doesn't take all afternoon, but it's not a 5 minute job either.
I can't imagine a submarine..
 
I have a golf cart with six 8volt batteries.. That's 24 caps to remove, fill, and replace.. it doesn't take all afternoon, but it's not a 5 minute job either.
I can't imagine a submarine..

When I still had FLA batteries in my golf cart I used an automatic watering system which made it about a 5 minute job. Some people claim the system creates problems but mine worked fine and I never had any issues with it.

Now I have lithium cells and watering is a distant memory.
 
When I still had FLA batteries in my golf cart I used an automatic watering system which made it about a 5 minute job. Some people claim the system creates problems but mine worked fine and I never had any issues with it.

Now I have lithium cells and watering is a distant memory.
RT has an interesting view on Israeli nuke missile armed submarines and projection of their power.

The batteries in the subs used by Israeli were reported as lithium but can’t find the reference now. The batteries in Japanese Subs are reported as lithium.

I read the old WW2 Exide batteries were ~250 batteries. So that would be constant work and they appeared to have a self watering type feature so each battery could be filled. That would be a lot of distilled water.. included video of one that found.

The military channel did specials on subs and revealed info that got Former USA navy ppl in trouble. Many years ago.

sure suck to be on a nuke sub and get gassing from the lead acid or get thermal runaway from the lithium. We are reported to have lost a lot of subs in WW2 and there was a submarine captain that never dived his submarine - reported but can’t find the story to it. The german uboats like to use their deck guns. I always found subs interesting… most of my family were - had been in the US Navy ….

other history the communist named rosenbergs were sentenced to death in USA for giving nuclear secrets to Russia in 1950’s it was reported Israel got those same secrets. It was also reported JFK took exception to Israel having Nuclear weapons. Now they have several and use submarines to project their nuke war powers. just conspiracy theory. JFK is dead and his brother bobby was murdered too.
 
It's almost comical thinking about our design requirements and complaints versus theirs too. "Our batteries could be cold, subject to vibration in my trailer with bad ventilation, and potentially have camping equipment dropped on them, and we live 50 miles from the nearest solar supplier" vs "40° crash dives, torpedoes, depth charges, 0 ventilation under hundreds of feet of water, with months between servicing, and very few spare parts available.

In one, a mistake could burn your house down, the other could trap dozens of men underwater to suffocate or burn to death. Ooph.
 
It's almost comical thinking about our design requirements and complaints versus theirs too. "Our batteries could be cold, subject to vibration in my trailer with bad ventilation, and potentially have camping equipment dropped on them, and we live 50 miles from the nearest solar supplier" vs "40° crash dives, torpedoes, depth charges, 0 ventilation under hundreds of feet of water, with months between servicing, and very few spare parts available.

In one, a mistake could burn your house down, the other could trap dozens of men underwater to suffocate or burn to death. Ooph.
That is probably exact reason 1 why USA sub captain reported never dived his submarine in WW2. Wish could find that story now.

Submarines - uboats were the source of WW2 German Navy strength and the submarines became several countries go to for power projection once nukes were added. I read several stories of the Germans in WW2 developing missle V2 type to be launched from uboats at the USA. Lucky for us germany did not have time to perfect their nuke bomb developments account that was the initial reported intents of the uboats launching missiles at the USA. I do find it interesting that the German sub captured during surrender of Germany was loaded down and headed to japan with advancements in warfare to keep it out of our - USA hands.
I even read the nuclear materials on that captured german uboat were used make the bombs dropped on Japan. That would be something if true. Imagine if the germans had known they didn’t need heavy water. Israeli might not have gotten free submarines from Germany so they could project their nuclear war powers in the middle east. One of those subs was reported to threaten after Israeli killed the Iranian nuclear scientist that was developing nukes for iran. Hmmm just never know how a nuke and a battery powered submarine might be used may even have one - submarine creep up on our coast someday and pop a emp. Be very hard to defend against sub attacks at that close distance.

I also find it entertaining the british got germany reported encryption device and knew the plans before they happened but still screwed it up. Report encryption device came from captured uboat. Other sources say it came from land via spys and smugglers. Just interesting tidbits to me about subs and weapons of war.

I think watching Captain Nemo as a kid hooked me on submarines. They - submarines have been reported used throughout our entire history of warfare. The diesel batteries were game changers. The nuclear powered subs were too.
 
Apparently they controlled speed by changing the battery configuration (voltage) and number of motors ran. I guess motor controllers weren't a thing back then. It's a pretty clever way to do it though.
Screenshot_20230315-110533_YouTube.jpg
 
Apparently they controlled speed by changing the battery configuration (voltage) and number of motors ran. I guess motor controllers weren't a thing back then. It's a pretty clever way to do it though.
View attachment 139872
On locomotives we did the same - counter back emf effects to the dc traction motors. I didn’t look it up but were the sub motors dc brushed? Thinking about it bet they were.
We would change dc traction motors from series to parallel and back depending on speeds….. we also did this with primary dc generator and then later with ac alternator replacement for main dc gen. Later we started changing ac alternator series and parallel and back again.

they were changing the battery configuration much like we changed the alternotor.

locomotives with new ac traction motors and motor controllers and larger alternators do not have to deal with those problems.

ac motor controls have only been around for a short period …. Ppl use to say ac motors would never replace dc motors for certain applications. The first classes took on ac motor controls were like looking at magic. Ha ? lot of ppl walked out after the classes and said bs. I didn’t say that and it became history changing for ac motor applications replacing dc. Reduced power contactors to almost nothing
anyway they basically just changed up battery config to deal with screw - motor back emf at lower or higher speeds. Power application
 
ac motor controls have only been around for a short period

Not sure what you mean by a "short period" because a company I worked for was making thyristor based inverter motor controls for locomotive applications back in the 1960s.
 
Not sure what you mean by a "short period" because a company I worked for was making thyristor based inverter motor controls for locomotive applications back in the 1960s.
basically for “high tractive freight diesel power” new…. But yes we did have ac motor controls on several things like blowers and fans… but don’t think so for ww2. Never really looked back at it. I would figure the dc motors in a sub are on gear pinions to the screws.
I worked a lot with siemens ge emd and so on… several smaller companies. We did a lot of conversion change overs too.
The passenger stuff is usually to light to handle tonnage of freight. the gearing for pinion -traction motors was also Resulted in slipped pinions and bird nested dc motors.

my primary training field for locomotive adaptation was from dc-dc to dc-ac to ac-ac. Diesel driven for dc generators and ac alternators. Did you work with 3rd rail or over head Passenger Electric. I never worked with them.

I even seen some of the stuff for mag lev too. Mag lev is basically a flat motor for ppl that don’t know. I am retired from it.
 
True, but dc motor control goes back much earlier than that. In World War Two, the huge guns on a battleships were slewed and elevated electrically. Hydraulics were really crude back then, it was all done electrically in those days with massive rotating machinery.

They had a device called an "amplidyne" which was an electromechanical amplifier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplidyne

You could vary the field current in a small generator, much like the control of an alternator in a car, with say a potentiometer.
The output of that would control the field current of a larger machine.
And the output of that control the electrical output of something really large and powerful.
In a battleship, plenty of mechanical power, thousands of horsepower very readily available, to drive this from a dedicated steam turbine.

So by tweaking a small potentiometer, you can very quickly slew a whole gun turret weighing many hundreds of tons. Its even possible to use a gyro stabilized platform and provide positional feedback to compensate for pitch and roll of your battleship.
Its about the only way to directly hit something that might be ten miles away in a slow ocean swell.

No electronic computers back then, no solid state power electronics either. Just brilliant electrical and mechanical engineering.
The technology may seem pretty crude by today's standards, but the engineers were really smart, and some extremely impressive things were achieved with what they had at that time.
 
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