Abstract:

According to the problems of the handheld launching method of expendable bathythermograph (XBT) , such as measurement disturbances from operators, an automatic drawing mechanism for the probe plug in the sea trials was proposed in this work. The lever was adopted here to magnify the tensile force in order to draw out the plug in limited stroke, which would make sure the full-automatic launching of expendable probes. The effectiveness and reliability of this mechanism has been verified by the corresponding laboratory tests. The success rate of probes deployment is over 95% and the mean time of the operation time is shortened more than 50%. The mechanism can also be used into various automatic launchers of expendable probes through a little configuration adjustment, which has a wide field of applications.

Key words: automatic launch, plug drawing, XBT, lever mechanism