Additively Manufactured Bulkheads for Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles

This paper documents the development of a novel, additively manufactured, pressure vessel bulkhead that enables lower cost, replaceable, and more modular uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) designs. We document the design characteristics, testing practices, and images of the fabricated components that were validated through shallow water testing. Our design approach included custom sections of non-standard geometries with additively manufactured bulkheads, paired with COTS acrylic tubing. This pairing utilized a custom bulkhead design to ensure that a waterproof seal could be achieved, with redundancy, through use of a redundant radial O-ring seal. To reduce risk of a single section leak impacting the full vehicle, we implemented a smaller diameter removable bulkhead, also with a redundant radial O-ring seal, that telescoped inside of the larger seals. This use of a redundant radial O-ring seal can also be referred to as a double piston seal, or a redundant bore seal. This paper documents the design characteristics, testing practices, and images of the fabricated components that were validated through shallow water testing. The ultimate design of this modular interface, with additively manufactured telescoping and redundant radial O-ring seals, was granted a patent in 2022.