An Island getaway on Mars

Antius · 2015-11-02 06:16:15

Here is a link to a wiki article on compressed earth blocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_block

Would be ideal on Mars where there is no topsoil or organic components to worry about. The unbaked bricks have strength between 2-5MPa on Earth. This can be increased by adding portland cement or lime, but regolith is generally basic anyway, i.e. instant gypsum. Presumably, the same technology could be used to produce larger pre-cast components and would thus avoid the need to lay rows of bricks in space suits.

Terraformer · 2015-11-02 10:35:10

Yet another possibility would be to use a tent to provide a pressurised space to work in.

SpaceNut · 2015-11-02 19:13:07

We do know how to make glass windows that can take the internal pressures that we would see at any mars construction already in use on the ISS cupola module. We only need to look at the methods used to make them and export that technology to mars for use as well as to define the selection of insitu resources system to make it possible to make the dome on Mars.

SpaceNut · 2015-11-03 21:31:31

The Space shuttle used three panes of glass made of aluminum silicate and fused silica, two materials of extreme strength and heat resistance. The Cupola windows are Transparent Aluminum (ALON) Ceramic composite glass such as Fused Silica and borosilicate glass.

RobertDyck · 2015-11-04 03:09:36

They made the Cupola of ALON? Woo hoo! I had argued for years they should replace the Shuttle windshield with ALON. Because it's strong, able to withstand micrometeoroids without pitting. They would hand grind the Shuttle windshield between each flight; using ALON would eliminate that. Does this mean someone listened to me?

ALON is ceramic: alumino-oxynitride. In the movie Jurassic World, they claimed their big "hamster balls" were composed of aluminum oxynitride. They used the full word "aluminum" instead of the prefix, but it means the same thing. This material was developed under contract for the US army in the 1980s for windows of tanks. Intended to stop bullets. Today they put a small camera on the outside of the tank, something like a smart phone camera, and a flat panel display inside. You can't shoot through a window if it doesn't have a window. I believe they have more than one camera, so if a soldier shoots the camera, the tank driver can switch to another camera. The movie Star Trek IV: Save the Whales ... uh, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, was made at the time they were developing it. A university was involved with initial development. So "transparent aluminum" was based on this. Gene Roddenberry always included leading edge technology of the day. But we now have that material.

ALON is based on synthetic sapphire. Pure synthetic sapphire is aluminum oxide, Al2O3, as a crystal. Clear as glass, extremely strong, and extremely hard. But it's a crystal, so very vulnerable to impact damage. It will shatter. ALON is a ceramic: mostly aluminum oxide, with a little aluminum nitride. Tensile strength is just a little less than sapphire, and ability to withstand heat a little less, but both not much. Most importantly, ALON can withstand impact damage, such as a bullet or micrometeoroid. ALON is made by taking extremely fine aluminum oxide powder (Al2O3) and aluminum nitride powder (AlN), and mixing together. The powders are heated to melt the outer surface of the powder grains, and fuse them together. The tricky part is to ensure no voids between powder grains. Any voids would produce a cloudy material, translucent instead of transparent. But you don't want to completely melt this to form a liquid, because that would solidify to a crystal. The surface has to be polished to be as smooth as glass. Any texture to the surface would again make it cloudy. But this material is almost as hard as sapphire, so the only way to polish is with diamond dust.

The name ALON is actually it's chemical formula: Al68O73N5. Just remove the numbers and you get AlON. A chemist will tell you the "L" should be lower case, because the symbol for aluminum is Al. "O" is oxygen, and "N" is nitrogen, so they should be capitalized. So it should be spelled "AlON", but sales and marketing guys will either make it all capitals, or capitalize just the "A".

Antius · 2015-11-04 15:03:35

RobertDyck wrote:

They made the Cupola of ALON? Woo hoo! I had argued for years they should replace the Shuttle windshield with ALON. Because it's strong, able to withstand micrometeoroids without pitting. They would hand grind the Shuttle windshield between each flight; using ALON would eliminate that. Does this mean someone listened to me?
ALON is ceramic: alumino-oxynitride. In the movie Jurassic World, they claimed their big "hamster balls" were composed of aluminum oxynitride. They used the full word "aluminum" instead of the prefix, but it means the same thing. This material was developed under contract for the US army in the 1980s for windows of tanks. Intended to stop bullets. Today they put a small camera on the outside of the tank, something like a smart phone camera, and a flat panel display inside. You can't shoot through a window if it doesn't have a window. I believe they have more than one camera, so if a soldier shoots the camera, the tank driver can switch to another camera. The movie Star Trek IV: Save the Whales ... uh, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, was made at the time they were developing it. A university was involved with initial development. So "transparent aluminum" was based on this. Gene Roddenberry always included leading edge technology of the day. But we now have that material.
ALON is based on synthetic sapphire. Pure synthetic sapphire is aluminum oxide, Al2O3, as a crystal. Clear as glass, extremely strong, and extremely hard. But it's a crystal, so very vulnerable to impact damage. It will shatter. ALON is a ceramic: mostly aluminum oxide, with a little aluminum nitride. Tensile strength is just a little less than sapphire, and ability to withstand heat a little less, but both not much. Most importantly, ALON can withstand impact damage, such as a bullet or micrometeoroid. ALON is made by taking extremely fine aluminum oxide powder (Al2O3) and aluminum nitride powder (AlN), and mixing together. The powders are heated to melt the outer surface of the powder grains, and fuse them together. The tricky part is to ensure no voids between powder grains. Any voids would produce a cloudy material, translucent instead of transparent. But you don't want to completely melt this to form a liquid, because that would solidify to a crystal. The surface has to be polished to be as smooth as glass. Any texture to the surface would again make it cloudy. But this material is almost as hard as sapphire, so the only way to polish is with diamond dust.
The name ALON is actually it's chemical formula: Al68O73N5. Just remove the numbers and you get AlON. A chemist will tell you the "L" should be lower case, because the symbol for aluminum is Al. "O" is oxygen, and "N" is nitrogen, so they should be capitalized. So it should be spelled "AlON", but sales and marketing guys will either make it all capitals, or capitalize just the "A".

Maybe a good material for your nuclear engine. As for Mars greenhouses you want something that can easily and cheaply be made from local materials. What is the cheapest material for producing a square metre of transparent pressurised growing space? ALON? Soda glass? Polypropylene? A detailed analysis is needed. The right choice is not necessarily the most exciting but the cheapest.

RobertDyck · 2015-11-04 15:45:20

Antius wrote:

Maybe a good material for your nuclear engine. As for Mars greenhouses you want something that can easily and cheaply be made from local materials. What is the cheapest material for producing a square metre of transparent pressurised growing space? ALON? Soda glass? Polypropylene? A detailed analysis is needed. The right choice is not necessarily the most exciting but the cheapest.

Could be used for the engine. But not a greenhouse. You're right, materials on Mars have to be cheap to produce from local materials. And you don't want to polyethylene or polypropylene, because they suffer greatly from UV degradation, aren't sufficiently air tight, and become brittle in the cold of Mars at night. Clarus is a brand name for PolyChloroTriFluoroEthylene (PCTFE), chemical forumula [CF3Cl]n. It can withstand the cold, it's highly resistant to UV because UV just shines right through without interacting, and highly impermeable to oxygen and water. However, it's a fluoropolymer, so expensive to make on Mars. Price on Earth is three times as expensive as Tefzel, a copolymer of regular ethylene with TetraFluoroEthylene [-CH4-CF4-]n. Tefzel is the premium polymer film used for greenhouses; it's more expensive but more durable to UV than other polymer films. But even Tefzel can't withstand the cold on Mars, and isn't sufficiently impermeable. Adding a metal coating to a polymer film will clog the pores, making it more impermeable to gas including oxygen and humidity. So the spectrally selective coating to protect against UV and control IR will also help keep air in. Ideal material for an inflatable greenhouse is Clarus with the same spectrally selective coating NASA uses for ISS windows and visors of spacesuit helmets. However, it's too expensive to make in-situ on Mars.

The cheapest material to make on Mars is glass. Just normal soda-lime glass. That's the same glass as a window for your house. It'll still need the coating for UV and IR, but just glass.

Antius · 2015-11-04 18:15:48

Cast glass panes in low-carbon manganese steel frame perhaps? Some form of putty could be used to seal the interface between the panes and frame. On Mars we should be able to tolerate some permeability as there is plenty of additional air in the Martian atmosphere. It's a case of how much you can economically tolerate given the energy cost of replacing it. I suppose the design process would be driven by cost-benefit analysis.

Void · 2015-11-04 19:37:26

Probable unwanted help, but ....
http://www.medicaldaily.com/glass-car-w … kin-255398

What ultimately makes windshields more opaque and protective than side windows is each window’s construction. Windshields, by law, are made with laminated glass. This includes three parts: two 2.1-millimeter layers of glass separated by an 0.8-millimeter piece of flexible plastic, which is designed to minimize injury upon shattering. Due in part to the plastic, with some help from the glass’s thickness, windshields offer 50 SPF, Dishart says, near perfect protection.

Granted, likely more expensive, but the saying is you get what you pay for.

Maybe the costs can ultimately go down with 3D printing:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/21/91862 … ted-matter
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/54 … s-barrier/

The machine prints soda lime glass, a family of glasses used in everything from water glasses to windows. But glasses like Pyrex could in principle be printed this way too, albeit at much higher temperatures.

So how would you get the plastic layer in there? I don't know. How do they do it for windshields, and why does the windshield block UV?

And I am also wondering why you can't have UV colored glass, the same as you can have red or blue glass?

I'm not picking on you guys, just compulsive on these types of things I guess.

Then there is this: (Ice House)
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/nasa-picks-3d- … rs-1521885

The idea is to harness that gas, heat it up, turn it back into water and then use a robot to spray layers of water, fibre and aerogel to create an outer ice shell that freezes immediately on impact. In addition to being translucent so light can come into the conical house, the ice walls protect against radiation.
The outer ice shell is then coated in a membrane of Dyneema-reinforced EFTE plastic to prevent the ice from sublimating, and then within the ice shell, a multi-level habitat can then be built that includes personal and communal rooms, as well as a hydroponic garden to provide oxygen and food.

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Of course the ice house will not be suitable for low latitudes. But I wonder what the thinking would be on the EFTE plastic? Expensive as implied in previous dialog I suppose.

I would not be the first, so I will go ahead and annoy further by saying that for my purposes, I would not want to use glass as the pressure envelope. That is not to imply that your plans are flawed, it is just the structure I would build would not work well with it, since the solar flux could change suddenly from hot to cold and the glass would crack from thermal shock. Left to my own devices, at this point I would want to build a cylindrical metal cage, like a corset. Anchor it to a cylindrical "Basement" buried in the soil or embanked with transported and stabilized sand dune materials. I would place a bladder of some transparent film inside the corset, and I am currently thinking EFTE.

But I would still have a use for soda glass. I would like to see scales manufactured from it so that they can hang off of the outside of the metal cage. I would want them to both block the abrasiveness of wind blown dust, and to block the UV.

The reason I want the above structure is I would want to focus solar mirrors on it to increase the amount of light the "Tower" intercepts.

And just so I don't get a nasty and unfair bump for being off topic, I might want to size it up so that I could put a big island inside of it. Or maybe not. Not sure yet.

Point being that for places where the ground may be deep sediments and ice (Which might be most of the northern hemisphere almost down to the equator, you could place these towers at intervals and connect them with underground tunnels. In fact the basements could be filled with water (Except for an elevator shaft), and yes! You could have a small family sized personal tropical island in each one or perhaps a giant gerbil . A floating island! And you could have whatever you want above in the tower which would go up rather high. I advise against coconuts, as they might do more than bonk you on the head.

th?id=A7808f04a688cb11bc7e196a7b7dc773f&w=182&h=183&c=7&rs=1&qlt=90&pid=3.1&rm=2

I'm on topic, I'm on topic

Oh, if you are on a floating island which is the house you sleep in, and often dwell in and your personal tower starts to depressurize, with training, it is possible that you and your family can dive down into the flooded basement, and access breathing and other protective gear under a column of water which would of course start boiling on top and start to turn over as cold water accumulated on the top, but you might survive by your own means, or with a rescue. I would anticipate that an alarm would go off, if the pressure started to drop, and if your people were properly trained they might have chances.

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As penance for the above, I defer to NASA at this time, or Scientists, I'm not sure:
https://lockerdome.com/6574100214714689 … 7807034644
0be6087164b8459a8a1560285db41dd7e5728230b7feac7aadadd0e7e54a4d63_large
Yes, I believe RobertDyck that it would be hard to duplicate that with what could be done on Mars, but it is still and interesting article.

Last edited by Void (2015-11-04 20:43:10)

SpaceNut · 2015-11-05 22:16:31

We will need glass that is alot tougher than windshield safety glass than that of an automobile and while there is a benefit of a laminant glass that has a flexible plastic inner layer it will only still be just one of the layers of protection as a second layer seperated from the first would given a backup to the primary system to protect any crew outside in shirt sleeves under a dome.

3d printing would be of use once we can refine the needed materials into the fine powder necessary to allow for it to move a mixed power and adhesive for exact placement of the material to be heated most likely by Laser to sinter the powder to form into glass as the printer moves along the pre-programmed path.

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#51 2015-11-02 06:16:15

Re: An Island getaway on Mars

#52 2015-11-02 10:35:10

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#53 2015-11-02 19:13:07

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#54 2015-11-03 21:31:31

Re: An Island getaway on Mars

#55 2015-11-04 03:09:36

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#56 2015-11-04 15:03:35

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#57 2015-11-04 15:45:20

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#58 2015-11-04 18:15:48

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