Design and analysis of deepwater tension sensors for ice drill application

• Published in: Annals of Glaciology
• Main Authors: Jianguang Shi, Shengmiao Huang, Binyan Wang, Chong Li, Shilin Peng, Youhong Sun, Pavel Talalay, Haibin Yu
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press 2021
• Subjects: Ice coring; ice engineering; subglacial lakes; Meteorology. Climatology; QC851-999; Annals of Glaciology; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1017/aog.2020.71; https://doaj.org/article/d16a02a888524ed98a8bef2094ea4c66

Monitoring the tension in cables is significant in some ice drill and deepwater applications. Take our RECoverable Autonomous Sonde (RECAS) for example. It is able to melt a hole to the bottom of ice sheet and is able to move upwards. A winch is installed inside RECAS to release and recover the cable, whose tension needs to be monitored in real time in order to control the behavior of the winch. The high pressure of deep water and limited installation space pose great challenges in sensor development. In this paper, two editions of newly designed deepwater tension sensors are proposed. The first edition is based on a fresh hydraulic load module that operates in high pressure environment and the second edition tension, which aims to improve the accuracy, applies a newly designed watertight load module. Detailed force transmission and characteristic analysis of the sensors are carried out. The sensors have got through a series of experiments, including calibration experiments, pressure experiments and field experiments. The resultant accuracy of the second edition sensor, which has a better performance, is over 2% under the measuring range of 1000 kg and the dimension of the final sensor is as compact as 150 mm × 137 mm × 86 mm.