General > General Technical Chat
Berlin AquaDom explosion - what went wrong?
tooki:
--- Quote from: ebastler on December 19, 2022, 11:20:18 am ---While the AquaDom was located in a hotel lobby, and owned by the investment fund which owns the hotel building, it was operated by the Sea Life aquarium -- a large commercial aquarium located next door. They operate their own facility with many tanks there, so it is safe to assume that they employ full-time experts for all aspects of aquarium maintenance.
--- End quote ---
Incorrect:
--- Quote ---Der AquaDom ist eine eigenständige Attraktion und ist nicht im Besitz des SEA LIFE Berlin, auch Wartung und Instandhaltung liegen nicht beim SEA LIFE Berlin.
--- End quote ---
Source: https://www.visitsealife.com/berlin/media/qk1lspla/pressemitteilung-sea-life-berlin.pdf (Also attached)
While this leaves open whether care for the animals was done by sealife, maintenance clearly is not.
tom66:
Also worth a look (per a Wikipedia source): https://madisongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Investigating_Acrylic_Aquarium_Failures.pdf
Curious that the failures seen so far are usually progressive though. You might expect to see an empty AquaDom with a crack running through the middle of it, not one that appeared to fail explosively, so I wonder if the failure method is different to that shown on slides 18, 19 and 21. Those failures seem to be almost universally at the adhesive joint, rather than of the actual acrylic. (Does this mean they do not use a plastic welding process to bond the sheets permanently? I know very little about acrylics to comment on whether this would be viable.)
Slide 20 shows a crack that was on a tank built by none other than Reynolds... (not sure who repaired it, but apparently that tank is fine now)
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2014/12/116_169594.html
Slide 27 is also quite interesting, I guess you really want to be approaching the 1010 side of the time curve for a product like this, for a long term installation with a life of around 50-100 years. It did do over 19 years, or 6x108 seconds. Maybe the warranty was 15 years. ;D
Anyone care to calculate the stress on the walls of the AquaDom given the weight of water?
Side note - it's crazy to me that there's so much demand for over-sized aquariums that there are several companies in the US alone that specialise in making them. I can't imagine how many they produce per year to make this viable, but it can't be a small number.
pcprogrammer:
The video about the maintenance showed redoing of the joints, and I guess that Reynolds Polymer was called in for that job. Even though special material, it won't last, just as normal silicone in your bathroom.
It looked like quite the undertaking that was carefully planed, and most likely also very costly.
One can only wonder how often the outside of the tank needed to be cleaned, but with a many million euro investment and possible liability on the line, I doubt they would cut corners and outsource it to some no good cheap ass cleaning company.
Think of the insurance claim if someone was killed by it and it turns out to be due to cutting corners.
AndyBeez:
First rule of engineering fails ask, what has been changed? Countless times buildings and bridges have collapsed after maintenance, upgrade and improvement. I assumed the Aquadom had been in some steady state since it's construction. Nope, it was "modernized" in 2018/19, leaving a potential ticking time bomb: It's possible the update work used materials that were too rigid. The materials work fine in Florida, but this ain't the sub tropics.
ebastler:
--- Quote from: tooki on December 19, 2022, 12:01:17 pm ---
--- Quote ---Der AquaDom ist eine eigenständige Attraktion und ist nicht im Besitz des SEA LIFE Berlin, auch Wartung und Instandhaltung liegen nicht beim SEA LIFE Berlin.
--- End quote ---
While this leaves open whether care for the animals was done by sealife, maintenance clearly is not.
--- End quote ---
Thanks, tooki. It is not quite clear to me what is included in "Wartung und Instandhaltung": The major overhaul a couple of years ago would clearly be included in that term, and it makes sense that this was the responsibility of the owner rather than the operator. But daily maintenance like cleaning, which on the inside of the tank was apparently done by two divers employed full-time -- not sure whether that falls under "Wartung" or daily operation.
There is probably a bit of spin-doctoring going on with that press release too. The "separate attraction" was not all that separate, it seems: You always bought a single ticket for both, access to the AquaDom elevator and the other aquairiums at Sea Life. "It wasn't us!" is obviously the message here...
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