Re: Pykrete

2006-2-6 10:55:00

Larry quotes me:

"It would be kept frozen with a refrigeration system and would never melt unless it was a controlled melt."

I have practical experience working with some pretty large scale refrigeration systems (in the U.S Navy). So here you are going to have a huge floating city which is in effect a "heat sink" for the entire ocean, and if you don't know it, water is a very efficient medium for heat transfer.

Any effect on the temperature of the ocean would be negligible.

 "The building blocks would not be made from mineralized seawater but from desalinized seawater which would be like fresh water."

And where does "desalinized seawater" come from? At sea it has to be distilled which takes a lot of energy. I also have some experience with that in the U.S. Navy. We distilled all of our fresh water once we were at sea.

The newer plants use reverse osmosis.  Israel has the largest in the world which produces 100 million cubic meters per year - much more than we will need for some time.

Kuwait has been desalinating water for mass use since the 1960's and has so much they have used it in agriculture for some time.  We will use some desalinization no matter what direction we go and getting all the fresh water we need should be no problem

"There are several reasons that I am attracted to this.  First the main building material (water) is readily available."

Yes water is very abundant. But there are serious engineering obstacles.

Personally I believe these cities will be built, but from an engineering standpoint I seriously doubt they will be built of Pykrete. :)

There has been very little research on Pykrete and I think it would be worthwhile to do some research with it when the time comes. During World War II a prototype ship weighing 1000 tons was built with Pykrete and the whole thing was kept frozen solid with a one horsepower engine.  When the project was abandoned and power was turned off it took months to melt during the summer.  With the advances in technology we could get much more refrigeration out of that one horsepower engine today.

Now it is possible that we may find much better materials than Pykrete, but from what I have learned about it, it sounds like we should not dismiss its potential but look into it and eventually do experiments with it and other combinations and see how it can be best applied.

I can see the possibility of building an underwater city with this material.

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.  Fran Lebowitz (1950 - )