Thread: Collins Class submarine ...

Hi there,
I'm new to the forum and have been following threads with interest. Someone mentioned the Collins Class sub off-handedly. I'm just wondering what type of welding would be used to join the hull sections and what level of welding experinece would be expected of someone who was given the job of welding these sections together. Or would it possibly be done by an automated machine?
Ged

Given the collins reliability record I'd say they use second hand chewing gum

A sub hull is just a big pressure tank, but made to take pressure from the outside instead of inside, so I assume they use good boilermakers. I would imagine with the pressures involved they use good quality steel and strict controls and ndt on the welds to make sure it's all good, but I don't know any details. They have a low magnetic signature so that limits alloys. The oberon hulls were riveted as I recall.

Why ? Looking for a new career ?

Considering all the flack that the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) get, here is an article by the very busy Patrick Walters giving them a bit of praise about the development of our Collins Class Subs.

Nation's 'noisy' subs actually quiet killers : Patrick Walters | April 05, 2008
IT'S 30 years since the Royal Australian Navy first embarked on what was to become by far the most audacious and riskiest defence industry project undertaken in Australia.

In 2008, Australians are yet to fully appreciate the strategic significance of the Collins class submarine project and how it revolutionised the country's naval shipbuilding sector, kick-starting the local defence industry.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, it still seems incredible that the Hawke Labor government in 1987 took the plunge and approved the construction in Australia of a wholly new class of six submarines, a decision that astonished our close allies.

In doing so they ignored the considered advice of senior defence bureaucrats, allied naval chiefs and leading Australian industry chief executives that a local build posed far too many risks and should not be attempted.

From the start, the project stirred controversy, beginning with the choice of the Swedish company, Kockums, as the submarine designer, and Adelaide as the construction site. The successes and failures of the Collins saga embodied many of the problems faced by Australian industry in the 1990s as it struggled to adjust to a more open, dynamic global economy. In their definitive study of the Collins class submarine project, to be launched by Kim Beazley next week, Peter Yule and Derek Woolner explode popular myths about what are now widely agreed to be the most lethal conventional submarines in the world.

The first is that the Collins class was a budget fiasco costing the taxpayer billions more than budgeted. When judged against a string of other major Australian defence industry projects, including the hapless Seasprite helicopters, the submarines are actually a standout.

As the authors note, the Collins class were built to within 4 per cent of the original contract price after allowing for inflation. When the extra money for fixing all the problems identified in the late 1990s is added, the project came within 20 per cent of the original 1986 $3.9 billion contract.

Another myth is that the Collins were delivered years late, long after the original delivery schedule. The average delay turned out to be only 26 months, a formidable achievement for a new class of submarine. The Collins project stacks up extraordinarily well when compared with submarine-building disasters in the US and Britain over the past 20 years.

A further popular misconception is that the Collins boats are as "noisy as a rock band". As Woolner told Inquirer this week, there was no evidence for that oft-repeated refrain. The early boats did have some noise problems, partly due to propeller cavitation problems which, thanks to the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, have been rectified. Now they are acknowledged as being exceptionally quiet.

The original decision to build all six submarines in Australia was a huge leap of faith. That it happened at all was due principally to the crusading zeal of three men: Australian engineers Hans Ohff and John White, and a doggedly determined submariner, Graham White, the first head of the navy's new submarine project team in the early 1980s.

The pugnacious, mercurial, German-born Ohff, together with White, one of Australia's truly gifted industrial visionaries, stumped the country, convincing first the RAN and then sceptical state and federal politicians and local industry, that it could be done.

White and Ohff ran the losing German IKL-HDW bid for the new submarines but they both later went on to make enduring contributions to naval shipbuilding, Ohff returning in the '90s to manage ASC, the Collins constructor in Adelaide, and White running the highly successful Anzac frigate project at Tenix's Williamstown dockyard.

Woolner told Inquirer this week that nobody involved in the Collins project at the start fully comprehended how difficult the whole thing would be, from the design phase to engineering and construction, from project and consortium management to hugely complex systems-integration tasks led by the much-troubled combat system.

Right at the start, Swedish welding of the bow section of the first submarine turned out to be a major issue. Leading-edge research, including painstaking steel-alloy analysis led by DSTO, eventually solved the problem. Long-running tests on the subsequent Australian-made hull section welds have not revealed a single flaw. DSTO's scientific expertise proved fundamental to the overall success of the Collins project, including the Australian-designed and manufactured anechoic tiles that cover the external casing of the submarines.

The original combat system supplied by US company Rockwell never worked and had to be junked. Mooted solutions generated bitter divisions within the navy and the Defence Department and led to intense political debate inside the Howard government about the future of the project, with several ministers asking why it should not be scrapped altogether.

In 2001 the Howard government and then navy chief David Shackleton overturned the navy's recommendation that the German STN Atlas combat system be fitted to the Collins class.

In a strategic policy shift, the government turned to the US for help and a navy-to-navy agreement signed on September 10, 2001, opened an unprecedented era of bilateral co-operation.

The US partnership has since helped solve a range of complex technical issues affecting the performance of the boats.

Yule and Woolner stress the RAN and the Defence Department were slow to adjust to the reality that they, rather than a foreign shipyard, were now responsible for the submarines.

Adelaide-based ASC, 100 per cent government-owned, is now gearing up to build the $8 billion air warfare destroyers, a task that could not have been attempted without the Collins experience. They are also the designated design authority for the Collins class boats, taking over that role from Kockums five years ago after the government acquired the Swedish firm's share of ASC. ASC hopes to design and build a new class of submarines for the RAN.

Woolner believes that, even with the experience of the Collins build, it will still be a high-risk endeavour.

"The next submarine should be a sensible extrapolation of the one that went before," he warns.

"You start off with your existing design and add areas where there hasbeen considerable technological improvement. If you build on what is already there, I think you can make a success of it."

The Collins Submarine Story - Steel Spies and Spin, by Peter Yule and Derek Woolner (Cambridge University Press), $59.95.

Sadly some of the expertise developed in the building of the Collins Class was lost to the mining boom after the last boat was finished.
Perhaps the building of the new Air Warfare Destroyers by ASC will redress this loss of expertise.

Cheers
SG

the project came within 20 per cent of the original 1986 $3.9 billion contract
The average delay turned out to be only 26 months

And they do break down and give trouble. I know this sort of thing happens fairly commonly on government projects and a little less so on private projects, but when it does happen the project isn't usually considered a roaring sucess. I accept the media have ahd several feeding frenzies with teh collins class, and you really can't believe anything they present (in fact you can often be sure the opposite is true), but it is drawing a long bow to call them a sucess.

For such a project you really need to compare it with other similar developmental projects worldwide. The government knows there will be time and cost overruns on such programs, so the initial costs and timings reflect best estimates of the day. The F111, Jindalee OTHR, Collins, C-17, Bushmaster and a host of other projects have run over cost. Over the life of the weapon system though they have provided great capability to the people of Australia and proven to be value for money. If you rate nations by their ability to run and manage their large development projects successfully then Australia is right up there with the best. For example, the speed of acquisition and implementation of the C-17 pretty much left the world gobsmacked.

The media reports are driven by a mixture of desires: to tell it how it is, political influences, need to sell papers, and the desire of the reporters to get their names on headers. Successes simply don't pull the headlines. Now, if you would care to compare our media to other media around the world you might get a very different picture

Originally Posted by Gedmet

Hi there,
I'm new to the forum and have been following threads with interest. Someone mentioned the Collins Class sub off-handedly. I'm just wondering what type of welding would be used to join the hull sections and what level of welding experinece would be expected of someone who was given the job of welding these sections together. Or would it possibly be done by an automated machine?
Ged

From the reports that I have read, the welding was performed more by skilled welders than by machines.
The boats that were made in Australia showed a higher level of skill and quality than the first. Some of the special welding techniques were developed here at ASC to cope with the special metals used.
We should be extremely proud of this accomplishment as the building of the Collins class was the most complex undertaking ever attempted in Australia.
These boats are now acknowledged as among the best conventional submarines in the world.
Cheers
SG

To answer your question the hulls were joined in sections by highly experiaced boilermakers using plain old stick welders one inside and one on outside, and they involved multiples passes on each join, at the time the exact type of electrode used was a official secret and to my knowledge still is

This is double dutch to me but it may be of some help.

"A MIL-121TM flux cored arc welding consumable, Alloy Rods Dualshield (R) II 120-M2, has recently been qualified for use in the fabrication of the pressure hull of the Royal Australian Navy Collins class submarines."

"The construction of the COLLINS class submarines has been relatively free from hydrogen-induced cracking during welding. This has been achieved by great care and attention to keeping levels of hydrogen low in welding, particularly through the diligent use of a high degree of preheat (120°C) in all pressure hull welding. The latter involves a large degree of conservatism and expense but is necessary because the underlying process of weld metal hydrogen-induced cracking is not well understood. This good welding record has been achieved using the manual metal arc and submerged arc processes, although the flux cored arc welding process has recently been qualified for use in the fabrication of the COLUNS pressure hull. A crucial part of the backup to this qualification process is to establish, by controlled laboratory testing, the relative resistance of the flux cored arc welding consumables to hydrogen induced cracking. These tests will ensure that the introduction of the flux cored arc welding consumable does not increase the risk of hydrogen-induced cracking in the pressure hull of the COLLINS class submarine. The gapped bead on plate test was used to compare the hydrogen-induced cracking resistance of welds produced using the flux cored arc consumable with welds produced using the manual metal arc and submerged arc consumables currently used on the submarines. The hydrogen-induced cracking resistance of the flux cored arc welding consumable was found to be better than either the manual metal arc or the submerged arc consumables and so the introduction of the flux cored arc welding consumable for use in the welding of the COLLINS pressure hull will not increase the risk of hydrogen induced cracking. The hydrogen induced cracking resistance of the manual metal arc consumable was found to be better than the submerged arc consumable, in agreement with shop floor experience. The present investigation has produced two findings of general importance. Firstly, the notion that good weld metal toughness will confer good resistance to hydrogen- induced cracking is examined and it is shown that there is no scientific basis for a "one to one" relationship between toughness and hydrogen-induced cracking resistance. Secondly, the hardness of the heat-affected parent metal adjacent to the weld is often used to flag the possible propensity to hydrogen-induced cracking. However, the present results show that the hardnesses of the heat-affected zones produced by each process were similar to each other and give no information regarding the likelihood of weld metal hydrogen-induced cracking.

A MIL-121TM flux cored arc welding consumable, Alloy Rods Dualshield (R) II 120-M2, has recently been qualified for use in the fabrication of the pressure hull of the Royal Australian Navy Collins class submarines. Gapped bead on plate testing has been carried out to compare the hydrogen-induced cracking resistance of welds produced using the flux cored arc consumable with welds produced using the manual metal arc and submerged are consumables currently used on the submarines. These tests will ensure that the introduction of the flux cored arc welding consumable does not increase the risk of hydrogen-induced cracking in the submarine pressure hull. The resistance of the flux cored arc welding consumable was found to be better than either the manual metal arc or the submerged arc consumables and the introduction of the flux cored arc welding consumable for use in the welding of the Collins pressure hull does not increase the risk of hydrogen induced cracking. The lower strength level of the deposited flux cored arc weld metal, contributed to its greater hydrogen- induced cracking resistance by reducing the residual stress state in the weld metal and by improving its inherent resistance to hydrogen 'embrittlement'. It is shown that there is no fundamental reason for a 'one to one' relationship between hydrogen-induced cracking resistance and toughness in nominally 690MPa yield stress weld metal. The hardness of the heat affected zones prduced by each of the processes were not significantly different and gave no information regarding the likelihood of weld metal hydrogen induced cracking. "

Hi guys
Did you know that Panorama Tafe in South Australia set up the school that trained and tested the welders for the project.It was no different really from fabricating any other pressure vessel except that the pressure of course is in the reverse to what is normal.

That project succeeded more in terms of making some submarines ,but set the ground work for other future big developments which spun off from the original.

Amidst all the paper talk, I think Browyn Bishop then a Federal Govt Minister showed her faith and took a ride on one of the test dives.

We where showing the rest of the world that we are a country that can still make things from scratch.

I listened to a program on ABC Radio National last year and the subs have indeed snuck up on the Yanks off Hawaii in an exercise. This was not a once off event.They were able to do it a couple of times and the Yanks knew they were coming.
Yes there have been problems as with any new venture.The experience even in sorting those problems has been invaluable to industry in this country.

Its for precisely that reason of biased press coverage that I have little time for the media and especially the press.The press has a nasty habit of not doing the proper research on many stories but rather just reprints what some one else has written. I believe that to be the case with the sub story.

Our current problems could be made better by the press not constantly trying to paint a negative picture.Of course we all know its a very bad problem, but any problem is easier to tackle if one takes a positive outlook to it.The press have not found that one out, as yet!

Grahame

So to sumarize you could say that the Australian public has been misled by the media, however the rest of the worlds navy's understand the capabilites of our subs and respect them ,they dont treat them with contempt like you would think they deserve according to media reports.

Matt.

AFAIK the dodgy parts of the sub (the leaking bits) were welded up in Sweden... Latest announcement is the replacement for the Collin's subs will be made here by the ASC.

Originally Posted by Scribbly Gum

We should be extremely proud of this accomplishment as the building of the Collins class was the most complex undertaking ever attempted in Australia.
SG

That's a big call. I worked for csiro for many years and I would suggest other projects in Australias history rival the collins in every respect.

AFAIK on the first sea trial was quickly abandoned as the sub had to be modified as it was in danger of rolling over
The first computers in the design specs were 486 XT computers which were quickly outdated but the specs called for them so they were sourced and fitted later to be scrapped with the installed combat system
The swedish design was a costal defence sub , the german design was navy preferred and a deep sea sub but the south australian labor gov under Don Dunstan was very shakey , the original tenders the german design to be built in NSW was the lowest , and both were rejected and told to revise and come back with a lower tender the second tenders the SA sub came under the NSW price and just , less that 1 mill under the supposed government fund allowance , this of course blew out but the SA government was re-elected .

The media knows squat about defence.
As far as they are concerned, anything that has treads is a tank, anything that flies fast is a fighter and any ship of the navy is a battleship.
All they want are sensationalist stories with little regard for the facts.
The sad thing is that the general public is so ignorant of defence issues, and so disinterested in finding out for themselves, that they swallow the rubbish that journalists print and report.
So the moral of the story is to do some research for yourself and find out the facts - as the journalist should have done in the first place, and don't trust the media when it comes to defence (and other) issues.

Cheers
SG