Name: How a Single Swedish Submarine Defeated the US Navy
Uploaded: 2021-06-01T14:26:45.000Z
Duration: 7 min 6 s
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This episode of Real Engineering is brought to you by Brilliant, a problem solving website

that teaches you to think like an engineer.

The US military has the strongest and most diverse navy in the world.

The US militaries fleet of aircraft carriers is so large, it makes the US navy the second

largest airforce in the world, second only to the actual US Air Force.

A single Nimitz- class aircraft carrier like the USS Ronald Reagan, a 6.2 billion dollar

nuclear powered ship, can carry the twice aircraft as any other foreign carrier, which

makes it even more shocking that it was sunk by a single diesel powered swedish submarine

A single submarine that cost the same as a F-35 at 100 million dollars managed to sneak

by an entire carrier task force, with anti-submarine defences to enter the red-zone and score multiple

torpedo hits on the USS Ronald Reagan, sinking it virtually, before shrinking back into the

This was just one of many exercises where the Swedish Gotland class submarine proved

too stealthy for the world's strongest navy.

The new submarine proved so threatening that the US military leased the Swedish sub for

an additional year to develop strategies to counter the silent threat.

So what set the Gotland apart from other subs.

Submarines' primary instrument to detect enemy subs is sonar.

Sonar is essentially a finely tuned ear that works like a whales or dolphins echolocation

There is active sonar where the submarine will send out a sound pulse called a “ping”

and listen for the reflections, but in warfare this isn't a sound strategy, as that ping

is detectable by enemies to give your exact location, so passive sonar is used where no

ping is emitted and instead you simply listen.

These electronic ears are so accurate that the nationality of submarines can be determined

based on the operating frequency of the alternating current used in it's power systems.

The 60 Hz alternating current of a US sub could be differentiated from the 50 hz of

European subs, if the transformers and other electronics were not adequately insulated

The Swedes managed to create a submarine so silent that it was practically undetectable

by passive sonar, so how did they do this at such a low cost?

The Gotland was the first submarine in the world to use a stirling engine as it's power

Stirling engines are not a new concept with the first being created and patented by Robert

Inspired by a series of high pressure steam boiler explosions at the beginning of the

industrial revolution, Stirling wanted to create a safer engine that did not require

I can't be arsed trying to animate this old drawing, let's go for something simpler.

He did this by creating a closed cylinder containing a fixed mass of gas permanently

Here one side of the piston cylinder has a large buffer space, which allows for a relatively

constant pressure on this side of the piston, while the other side fluctuates in pressure

When heat is applied to the outside of the cylinder, the pressure increases causing the

piston to move until the pressure equalizes.

Now, if we cool the outside of the cylinder with a heat exchanger, the pressure will drop

This is our basic pressure cycle to create mechanical work.

But, this is an insanely inefficient system, as most of the energy we put into the system

as heat is lost during the cooling cycle, not to the gas, but to the actual cylinder

Robert Stirling solved this by adding a displacer piston, which can drive the gas from one end

Allowing this end to be permanently hot, and the other permanently cold.

So the cylinder wall is no longer experiencing a temperature cycle.

The pressure cycle here works slightly differently.

First the air in the hot end expands and causes the displacer to move into contact with the

power piston, displacing more air from the cold end to be heated and expanded, allowing

The air on the hot end now has nowhere to go, and so is driven to the cold end, where

it is cooled and contracts causing work to be done once again on power piston.

The efficiency of this system can be increased further by placing what is essentially a heat

battery in the tubes between the hot and cold cylinder.

This conserves a huge amount of heat that would otherwise be wasted during the cooling

cycle, and gives the heat back to the air as it travels back to through.

Robert Stirling dubbed this the regenerator.

Now we have the foundations of a useful engine.

By incorporating a coolant system and a heating chamber we create a larger temperature differential

to drive the engine, and the efficiency can be future increased by increasing the number

of tubes connecting the hot and cold spaces, along with the number of regenerators, and

adding fins to increase the surface area of these tubes to allow for heat transfer.

Stirling engines ultimately fell into obscurity as stronger steel became available to make

steam engine boilers safer, but have seen a resurgence in recent decades with the Gotland

The Gotland uses two Stirling engines that use diesel and liquid oxygen to provide heat,

These generators can run an electric motor directly, or charge batteries that can provide

All the while the exhaust is compressed and stored on board, allowing the sub to stay

submerged for up to 2 weeks vastly longer than any other diesel power submarine.

So why is it so silent compared to other submarines, it doesn't require much explanation as to

why using an internal combustion engine using tiny controlled explosions for power tends

While the the multi-billion dollar nuclear powered submarines need to pump huge volumes

of coolant to their reactors to prevent a meltdown, causing enough noise to be detectable

On top of this, recently declassified intelligence suggest that Russian subs are using these

instruments to detect the faint trail of radiation left in the wake of these nuclear powered

Giving the swedish submarine another way of avoiding detection.

This is a fascinating application of the laws of thermodynamics.

Understanding and applying the laws of science is the closest to a real life superpower in

So why not unlock your superpower of understanding the universe by taking this course on Astronomy

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How a Single Swedish Submarine Defeated the US Navy

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