Newsweek: Chinese engineers apply for patents for undersea ‘cable breakers’ | News in brief

Newsweek Chinese engineers apply for patents for undersea cable breakers

According to the US magazine Newsweek, Chinese engineers have designed an easy and cheap way to cut submarine cables.

The US magazine Newsweek has investigated patent applications filed by Chinese engineers in recent years for devices for cutting submarine cables.

According to Newsweek, Chinese engineers had come up with solutions that make it easy and cheap to cut submarine cables.

In 2020, a patent application filed by engineers at Lishui University introduces a “retractable marine cable cutting tool”. The engineers justified their development work with the fact that as the number of sea cables increases, “they sometimes have to be cut in case of emergency”.

According to the engineers, the traditional cutting method has been that the sea cables are first located, lifted up and cut. According to Chinese engineers, the process was too expensive, complicated and required a lot of tools.

That’s why the engineers developed a device that looks and resembles an anchor, which can be pulled behind a ship. This could be used to cut cables along the ship’s journey.

According to the engineers, the success of the cutting could be verified by pulling the device up after the cutting work and examining it for copper residues.

If there were traces of copper on the device – i.e. the most popular conductor material for marine cables – the cable cut would have been successful.

The patent was developed on the basis of an older, 2009 patent application by the Chinese state marine engineers. According to Newsweek, neither patent application was approved for some reason.

Chinese ships connected to cable breakers

Chinese ships have been linked to several infrastructure damage at sea in recent years. In the Baltic Sea, Chinese ships were involved in the damage to the Balticconnector gas pipeline and submarine cables at the beginning of last year, as well as the breakage of communication cables in October.

The Chinese vessel was recently involved in an incident that occurred in the island nation of Taiwan at the beginning of the year, where an undersea communication cable was broken. Taiwanese authorities have said they suspect the cable was broken a Chinese cargo ship.

No signs of the use of “cable breakers” have been observed in the above-mentioned cases. For example, in the case of the Balticconnector, the Chinese ship Newnew Polarbear pulled anchor at the bottom. According to media reports, China has communicated that it was an accident.

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