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The racing of personal submarines is a sport for the 21st century, exploiting recent advances in underwater video, materials and diving technologies which showcases exploration and conservation of the undersea world. It will push the boundaries of technological innovation and test participants’ performance in the face of extreme adversity. Only those with a true pioneering spirit, ingenuity and the strongest fortitude will be victorious as miniature submarines race against each other.

 

Human-powered Racing Submarines

The human-powered class of racing submarines have been built and raced for over 15 years, mainly by graduate students as part of their Masters degrees. They are given the simple objective to design, build and then race a human-powered “wet” submarine, but only 6-8 months to complete the project. This short timescale makes this a “real-life” full sized engineering project with the challenges of assimilating complex subjects such as hydro-dynamics, buoyancy, scuba diving, and materials processing to create a working submarine in the timescale. The project is in fact a high-level STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) project. The students need to use skills from all these disciplines to calculate factors such as weight, displacement, buoyancy, propulsion and the impact on the pilot and the external environment.

Two-man, powered Racing Submarines

The next development for the Series will be powered submarines that are crewed by two divers (pilot and navigator) who will navigate along a Race-Tube (3-dimensional race course) to complete a longer and more challenging race than the human-powered models. Powered Racing submarines have been dubbed SubRacers, The SubRacers will be powered, using batteries (or other sorts of energy i.e. hydrogen cells) and are envisaged to retain a human-powered element to preserve the physical connection between humans and the ocean. This will ensure that both and in this way test both the physical and mental qualities of the crew are tested.