We all know that laying cables on land involves a variety of terrains and terrains, making it difficult to lay them, and even if they are laid in strict accordance with the process, faults can occur, sometimes with ships passing by or anchors touching the cables by mistake, and large fish can accidentally damage the cable shell. Worse still, enemy forces can deliberately sabotage them. Repairing these cables is no easy task, as the smallest damage can bring them to a standstill. And finding a small gap in tens of thousands of kilometres of fibre-optic cable takes a lot of manpower and resources.
Finding a faulty fibre optic cable with a diameter of less than 10 cm from a seabed that is hundreds or even thousands of metres deep is like looking for a needle in a haystack, and the difficulty of repairing and then renewing it is also very high. Submarine cable projects are recognised worldwide as large, complex and difficult projects. Even though it is difficult, problems must still be dealt with in a timely manner, otherwise the implications are enormous. Repairing a submarine cable is roughly a procedure of identifying the blocking point, salvaging, connecting, testing and putting back. The whole process is completed by underwater robots.
1、After the robot dives into the water, it finds the precise location of the broken submarine cable by scanning and testing.
2、The robot digs out the shallowly buried submarine cable in the mud, cuts it off with cable scissors and pulls both ends out of the water, and the engineer finds the faulty end by measurement.
3、The spare submarine cable is connected to the two broken points of the faulty submarine cable.
4、After connecting the spare submarine cable and repeatedly testing that the communication was normal, it was thrown into the seawater.
The repair work is so huge and complex that the optical cable should be well protected. In sandy and silty areas, a trench about 2 metres deep is created with high pressure flushing water and the cable is buried in it, with the sand next to it covering it; in coral reef and clay areas, a 0.6-1.2 metre deep trench is cut with a cutter and the cable is buried in the trench and naturally backfilled to form a protection; in hard In hard rocky areas, the cable needs to be protected by covering it with a hard object such as a concrete cover. In shark-infested areas, two layers of steel tape wrapped around the outside of the cable and a polyethylene jacket are added to protect the outside of the cable from damage.
