Abstract
The ecosystem of the abyss is one of the fields that humans hardly know. The ultra-high hydrostatic pressure makes it very difficult to obtain abyssal organisms. Samples are often severely broken during recovery due to changes in environmental pressure, temperature, and other factors. Currently, there are no macro-organism samplers suitable for the abyss. The development of a pressure-maintaining sampler for the abyss is a prerequisite for abyssal ecosystem research. This paper mainly proposed a pressure-maintaining trapping instrument (PMTI) designed to work at a depth above 10,000 m. Unlike typical deep-sea equipment, this instrument is lightweight (about 65 kg in water). The instrument adopts a new structure, using a hollow piston as the sampling space and sealing the mechanism with O-rings at both ends of the piston, thus avoiding sealing methods such as ball valves and greatly reducing the weight of the equipment. The structure and working process of the instrument are described in detail in this paper. Meanwhile, in this paper, the movement resistance of the piston (mainly the resistance of the O-ring) is analyzed using a dynamic explicit method in Abaqus. The factors affecting the friction of the O-rings are analyzed via the method of orthogonal tests and ANOVA. In addition, high-pressure tests were conducted on key parts of the instrument, and the results showed that the instrument works well at 100 MPa.
Highlights
The deep sea covers more than 50% of the Earth and is both a treasure trove of biodiversity and a source of important ecosystem services [1]
The abyss has become a subject of intense studies in recent years, our knowledge of the diversity of benthic organisms, especially at the molecular level, is far from complete [2]
Observations in recent years have shown that the hadal trench is not a desert of life
Summary
The deep sea covers more than 50% of the Earth and is both a treasure trove of biodiversity and a source of important ecosystem services [1]. Lots of instruments have been developed to capture animals at deep sea and bring them to the surface alive and maintaining the in-situ pressure. Most of the high-pressure instruments were developed to capture microbes in the deep sea due to engineering constraints. Most of deep-sea pressure-maintaining sampling equipment uses very heavy parts such as ball valves, which causes difficulties in the sampling work. Drazen developed a hyperbaric oxygen trap-booster instrument to capture and sustain living deep-sea organisms. There are few instruments for capturing large organisms in the hadal trench (depths over 6000 m) [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. We have built a pressure-maintaining trapping instrument (PMTI) designed to capture macro-organisms in the hadal trench.
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