From: The Butterfly (salsbury_at_bootstrap.sculptors.com)
Date: 03/22/98
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 04:39:16 -0800 Message-Id: <199803221239.EAA18320@bootstrap.sculptors.com> From: The Butterfly <salsbury_at_bootstrap.sculptors.com> Subject: Electrodeposition and Ecological Impacts
-From: "C.A. Cook" <coreycook12_at_email.msn.com>
-Date: Sat, 21 Mar 1998 07:40:49 -0600
-
-The Butterfly wrote:
-
->I have a photocopy of an old article where someone did some
->research on it [salt-water deposition] years ago. I've been
->meaning to transcribe at least the chemical formulae that show
->how the process works. I did some experiments a year or two
->ago to test the theory, and plan on doing more with this in the
->next few years. I'd actually like to start working on a new
->experiment in the nearby Pacific.
-
-By all means, post it.
I'm currently fighting with the software on my new scanner. (It's
for Win95, and keeps giving me General Protection Faults when I try to use
it... God Bless Microsoft... ;^) ). When I get that going, I'll try the
OCR stuff and see if I can get the whole article in.
-I am somewhat worried about the ecological effects of
-this, however. The early tests need to be just that, tests. If we have a
-long-term timetable set up dependant upon the tests coming back positive,
-it is possible that any ecological damage will be over looked.
I've thought about this, but I think the net ecological impact will
be positive. Perhaps vastly so.
I'll go into more detail below, but in a thumbnail view, here's a
few possible concerns, and benefits of the floating-city:
-Electrodeposition requires electricity. This is relatively easy,
and clean when generated by solar or fuel cells or wind or OTEC. We'll
probably use all of the above.
-Electrodeposition also requires a sacrificial anode. This is
something like a lump of iron which will donate ions into solution (the
seawater) in exchange for the Calcium ions it's pulling out at the cathode
to create CaCO3 (Calcium Carbonate) on the hulls. I'll have to double-check
the formulae again and make sure I've got all my terms correct, but that's
the basic idea.
-Is iron in seawater going to be a problem? Probably not. The
oceans of earth currently have something like a billion billion tons of
iron dissolved in them right now. The amount we'd use would be trivial in
comparison. (We're in the midst of packing, so I've got to go find my text
on Seawater Composition, but when I do I'll post the actual number.)
-There are side benefits from this iron:
-It's cheap. We could use lots of old junked cars that are
currently rusting all across the world. Cleaning up a lot of the landscape,
and reducing potential groundwater/runnoff threats, as well as junkyard
clutter.
-It's nutritious. (Well, for some forms of life,
anyway. :-) ) Blue-green algae, one of the bases of the food chain,
thrives on the stuff. We should be able to produce algae by the ton (or
kiloton) in the iron-rich waters around our growing hulls. This could then
either be used as foodstuff in itself, or as feedstock for higher-level
mariculture, such as fish, etc.
Also, using electrodeposition as a basis of general construction
allows us to construct things like the giant pipes and turbine housings
needed for OTEC, as well as general buildings, walls, etc. OTEC plants
bring up oxygen & nutrient rich cold waters from below, boosting
mariculture yields, etc. There's a whole bunch of synergetic benefits from
intertwining these systems.
->It takes very little electricity to get going, and I envision a
->floating platform of solar cells, running the electrodeposition
->underneath the surface. Also, catching the hydrogen runoff and
->diverting it to fuel-cells to provide a somewhat regenerative
->power source. I figure that over time, you'll get an ever increasing
->amount of sunlight + hydrogen, giving more power, giving more
->hulls to be electrodeposited, giving more hydrogen, giving more
->power... etc... :-)
-
-Similar to the scene in my mind. But how do you catch the hydrogen?
Check the scenario below.
-Also, I see the use of OTEC generators to power the actual cities. I
-don't think we will need to use turbine generators. This site lookes
-promising for a more efficient alternative.
-http://www.quantadyne.com/index.htm
-
-CA Cook, LF
-coreycook12_at_email.msn.com
-
-
I'll check out that site. I'm on an ASCII terminal right now...
I think we'll have oodles of energy sources. A fully-functioning
city should be able to supply all its power needs, and perhaps sell some
energy elsewhere. You'll have solar, wind, OTEC, fuel cells, wave energy,
biomass, solar-thermal, and perhaps others.
Here's the basic blueprint, as I foresee it: (I can, and will
expand on these in future posts. Feel free to ask about specific points,
and we can go into detail.)
-Start with either a small-ish boat/sailboat in the ocean, with a
hull suspended below it, or underwater, anchored near bottom, where you can
do some underwater scuba-construction of a hull-form.
-Use a geodesic hemisphere model, probably with a flat section
covering the non-curved, otherwise open part of the hemisphere. The rounded
part, after electrodeposition, will be the hull, and the flat part on top
will be the ground-level stratum of your city. The basic dome should be
covered with chicken-wire or finer screening, so that as the minerals begin
to electrodeposit onto the screen, the small holes will quickly fill in and
form a large sheet of mineral material. This would effectively become like
steel-reinforced concrete. (Also, the electrodeposition process happens as
long as you run current through the system, so you could conceivably have
hulls that were up and floating on the water, with a light current going
through them, that continue to accrete minerals and slowly thicken and
strengthen their hulls for years, even while the city has gone long past
the main "construction" phase, and has been operational for years.)
-Put a section of solar panels up to start harnessing sunlight, and
use this energy to drive the electrodeposition reaction. (As a side note I
was looking today at some flexible, floating solar panels that Real Goods [
http://www.realgoods.com/ ] sells, made by Unisolar. They put out about
22watts of power, each, are about 18"x36", and have grommets at the corners
so they could easily be lashed together into a huge raft.)
-At this point, the hulls are underwater, and bubbles of H2 and O2
will rise off of it, to be caught by some sort of apparatus, perhaps like
an underwater parachute or umbrella, which can hold the gas and direct it
into tubes for further use/storage.
-Probably right from the beginning this H2 and O2 should be
diverted into Hydrogen Fuel Cells, to provided added electricity.
-Once the first hull has enough structural stability and mineral
deposits to hold its own, it's brought to the surface, water is pumped out
the middle, so it floats (it can still be kept growing, as noted above).
-Then you suspend 6 more hulls in the water around the first,
diverting energy into those hulls, and catching 6x the H2 runnoff,
eventually bringing those to the surface, and running your next group of 12
hulls, etc. (For a visual display of how hull-growth might progress, check out:
http://www.sculptors.com/~salsbury/Oceana/ in section VII - Construction.)
-After probably the first 2 layers have been completed (1+6 hulls)
there should be enough room to manuever, allowing for the setup of more
permanent core facilities, such as power, water purification, basic
building construction (via electrodeposition, probably) more permanent
communications facilities, food production, etc.
-At this point, things begin to run in overlapping and congruent
fashion. We can then exploit some of the synergies mentioned earlier, such
as using the iron-rich water to grow food, building wave-energy catching
breakwalls to provide calm waters and abundant power, setting up wind and
solar farms to harvest these ever-present resources, etc.
Comments? Ideas? Thoughts?
-- Pat ___________________Think For Yourself____________________ Patrick G. Salsbury - http://www.sculptors.com/~salsbury/ --------------------------------------------------------- The only smart thing to do is to get smarter. -- Timothy Leary, The Intelligence Agents