Rapid O-Ring Prototyping Saves Critical Beluga Research

When beluga whale research in Alaska’s Cook Inlet was compromised by leaking acoustic instruments, the root cause traced back to a small but critical failure: standard O-rings couldn’t withstand the extreme mix of freezing saltwater, strong currents, and sediment. Apple Rubber rapidly developed custom sealing solutions in just three days, combining material expertise with fast-turn prototyping to redesign the O-ring for harsh conditions. The result was a complete turnaround—dry, fully functional instruments and successful data recovery—demonstrating how precision sealing and agile manufacturing can make the difference between mission failure and field success.

Transcript

00:00:02 this project is focused in understanding the foraging behavior of beluga whales this population of belugas here in cinet is endangered and it's declining so we are in a rush to understand what's wrong with them and how can we prevent the extinction cinet is is a very challenging place to work uh under water there's very strong currents 30 to 32 ft of tight and ice in Winter a lot of

00:00:29 siment so we are BAS basically using Acoustics sound to study these animals and so one of the problems we find is the water leaking into the instrument the key element in in the failure of these instruments is the O-rings when those fail just a few drops of water will be enough to basically fry the electronics we approach different companies one of them that we talk to

00:00:49 was Apple Rubber and they are sealed with two O-rings but uh we are having problems with these orings my name is John tranquil I've worked for Apple rubber for almost 30 years myself and my team we work with customers on troubleshooting projects when material becomes an issue to me the key here is to find the right or ring and and I think your company and you guys have the

00:01:11 expertise the Apple rubber team got to work finding a solution for his problems we needed to keep the recording device used for his research dry which meant we had to contend with factors like exposure to salt water freezing temperatures and strong currents our in-house mold making capabilities allow us to provide fast and economical prototype to

00:01:32 production over the course of 3 days we've created O-rings out of two types of materials both of which are outstanding for water and don't cause any sulfur outcasting we sent these to cook and L for Manuel to try out yeah so we were able to pull out the one of the instruments that we deployed

00:01:54 earlier with the the Apple rubber O-rings that we tested for the first time it it's hard to say until we open it so when we will open it we'll find out but it definitely looks like it didn't leak we couldn't hear any water in it and it look uh perfectly okay from the outside so it seems promising yeah so far it's looking good don't see any drip there we go ooh look

00:02:17 at that perfect okay let's just connect it and see if it's recording okay let's play this one ooh look at that right there nice right away yeah look at all these whistles there that's pretty cool it's actually cold yeah you can hear all the ones in the background and there and mean guy hello Manuel how the how' the project

00:02:41 turn out hi John thank you fine so we picked up four instruments so far and they are all dry we have a great dat on them so no signs of leakage I think those those rings are doing their job pretty well that's great to hear we uh look forward to working on more projects with you O-rings are very basic they're used in many applications but they're very very complex because you have to

00:03:02 have the right Groove you have to have the right seal you have to have the right design you have to have the right material Apple rubber loves taking these types of projects because we always want to support our critical infrastructure our critical natural resources I really want to thank you Apple rber for all their support and all

00:03:24 their help with this project it really makes a difference to have uh the right expertise uh helping us in these projects