Long(er) term immersion of WetLink Penetrators

Blue Robotics Products WetLink Products
1

I am interested if anybody has had any experience using the wetlink penetrators for long-ish deployments?

They have worked well for me for short (hours) deployments, but I am exploring projects with deployment times of 30-40 days. My expected depths are all less than 30m, with up to 3m tidal range. The docs that I have found suggest that the wetlink are good for multiple pressure cycles, but I couldn’t find anything out about duration duration.

2

Hi @oceanhoser, welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

Given our test procedure for validated WetLink Penetrator+cable combinations involved 500 cycles to 950 msw it would be very surprising to me if that seal wasn’t able to last 40 days at 33 msw.

That said, it would be useful if we can provide some official guidance on longer term submersions at depth, so I’ve asked internally whether we have specific data on that, and whether we can add some relevant information and/or guidelines to the technical details. I’ll follow up with the response.

3

Thanks @EliotBR , I look forward to what you are able to determine.

4

Following up,

  • we haven’t done much long term submersion testing, so don’t have statistically significant data on it, and can only provide limited guidance at this stage
  • the testing we have done indicates that the main/fastest degradation generally comes from repeated cycling to high pressures
  • some failure modes are outside our control and testing, and would need to be verified per use-case
  • assuming those effects are not major, we expect (but cannot guarantee) the seal and penetrator to withstand the rated pressure for at least a year, and potentially indefinitely at much lower pressures