Re: Pykrete

2006-2-2 20:34:00

Thanks for your comments Rick. No matter which direction we go I think your PXL's will be useful. My concern about using them for a foundation is the effect of the weather on them. It looks like the wind could blow them about pretty easily. I'd be interested in your views on this.

I think a stable power supply could be achieved so there would be no chance of the pykrete melting. I think that getting a supply of sawdust would be no problem and it is quite possible that a synthetic substance could be developed that could accomplish the same thing. Then it's quite possible we could use something from the sea like seaweed. As far as a supply of fresh water goes all we would have to do is desalinate the water we need.

There are new mediums of refrigeration developed which will not deplete the ozone. See Honeywell Refrigerants Europe.

The main advantage I see for Pykrete is the solid foundation it would create that could resist even a hurricane. In addition in shallow waters we could build on the ocean floor.

Rick: Even if your city is in the South Pacific, you're going to need to heat your house, because it's built atop ice (another major need for power).

JJ I don't think this would be the case. The ice would be covered with top soil (or some other material) and the surface would be as warm as a south sea island.

Rick wrote:

"You're getting ahead of us Ren. That's just the material I had in mind. The possibilities are endless. With it we could even build a city on the ocean floor and the main ingredient is water, which is certainly plentiful on the sea."

Pykrete is an interesting substance, but a poor choice for building floating cities. Why? First, because it wants to melt. True, not as fast as ice left out in warm air, but much faster than ice in a freezer that has lost power. If you create a 1/4 acre of real estate, from pykrete, only the "tip of the iceberg" is available for building a house on. The majority of the mass is unavailable, yet must be kept under constant refrigeration (a major cause of ozone layer depletion). On the other hand, real estate built from inflated bladders tips the scale towards efficient real estate., because a balloon will stay afloat, without the additional expenditure of energy, hundreds of times longer than a block of ice.

Secondly, building a city on pykrete is like building on frozen tundra. Even if your city is in the South Pacific, you're going to need to heat your house, because it's built atop ice (another major need for power). If you build on air structures, instead of ice, good insulation will almost eliminate the need for energy required for comfortable living conditions (where I would locate a floating city, walls keep rain out but temps average 69 without use of HVAC).

Power supplies (electricity needed to keep ice frozen), even the best of them, inevitably have black-outs. I would much rather build on a foundation of natural science (the buoyancy of displaced water), than a dependence on power companies to supply an un-interrupted energy supply to a refrigeration appliance. Rick's law of efficiency: the more parts in the assembly, the sooner it will break down. Pykrete requires fresh (not salt) water and sawdust (both precious commodities on a floating city), as well as a constant supply of energy. A ton of Pykrete will support a few hundred pounds, but a few hundred pounds of inflatable (PXL's) will support many tons.

Floating cities will be emulated by the rest of the world, primarily because they will be so much more efficient. If you built a floating city, atop pykrete, the most interesting thing, to the rest of the world, would be how long before it SINKS. And, since the majority of the ice is below water, if you want to build multi-story buildings or antenna towers (needed for communication and electric power generation), you will need to make the foundation ice thicker and segregate it from surrounding properties. You can't build large, solid real estate with ice. Each neighborhood would have to be separated from each other and connected by bridges, because tides and rough weather naturally break up any ice large enough to build a city on. Any pieces that might break off would be dangerous to be around. After all, it was an iceberg that sunk the Titanic. Pykrete is not structurally sound enough to build on today's oceans. In one-hundred years, when earth changes are about, the tides and weather will be even more extreme. I think we'd all feel safer, riding out the changes, sitting on inflated rafts, instead of ice cubes.

POWER FOR FLOATING CITY

Electric generating buoys? That sounds like something out of a 1950's "Popular Science" magazine. I think, in the next few years, we will finally see ideas from Tesla, Keely, et al, bearing fruit. Electricity is life [HPB]. When we begin to master the "good life", getting power to run our appliances will be as easy as breathing. We'll get all we need out of the air around us. More than 100 years ago, Tesla was making enough electricity, out of thin air, to produce his own lightning and J.W. Keely demonstrated a working flying saucer, capable of 500 mph, to the U.S. War Dept., seven years before the Wright brothers got off the ground at Kittyhawk N.C. Generating electricity with a buoy sounds more like something Ben Franklin would play with. Your scientist/philosopher bro.

Rick