Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

Antius · 2016-04-08 08:33:00

SpaceNut wrote:

About 2 percent of the soil on the surface of Mars is made up of water of if you heat up a cubic foot of Mars soil, you can harvest around two pints (one liter) of water with Earth having more than 10 times that amount.
Of course any dome made of a frozen soil needs to be sealed and insulated from the warming interior that Humans would create inside it. That said the outside would also need a sealant to keep that warming water from subliming away while in the days sunlight to keep it solid of which I would make the outer sealant white colored in order to reflect the heat from being obsorbed by the darker soil color.

Compressed soil blocks are created by compressing a mixture of clay, silt and sand into a mould at a pressure of 15MPa. The starting material is usually about 10% water for best results and the resulting blocks have strength up to about 13MPa, which is comparable to fired clay bricks. They can be moulded into practically any shape, including hollow hexagonal blocks such as those discussed for the transparent soil dome. By comparison, adobe mud bricks are less dense and typical strength is 1-2MPa. But they require less capital equipment to produce.

Tom Kalbfus · 2016-04-08 21:59:01

SpaceNut wrote:

About 2 percent of the soil on the surface of Mars is made up of water of if you heat up a cubic foot of Mars soil, you can harvest around two pints (one liter) of water with Earth having more than 10 times that amount.
Of course any dome made of a frozen soil needs to be sealed and insulated from the warming interior that Humans would create inside it. That said the outside would also need a sealant to keep that warming water from subliming away while in the days sunlight to keep it solid of which I would make the outer sealant white colored in order to reflect the heat from being obsorbed by the darker soil color.

The heat from the dome would probably be quickly conducted away by the ground. The average temperature deep under ground will be below freezing. The ground will be warm at the surface under the dome, but as you move further and further away from the dome underground, then it will get colder. I guess the trick is for the spreading heat to get to the point where it is below the freezing point of water as it gets close to the surface outside the dome., so the ice underground prevents the leakage of liquid water through the surface, and also the air from sifting through the regolith under pressure from under the dome to the outside. I think some atmospheric gases will inevitably escape to the outside, but the trick is keeping this leakage rate to manageable levels.

SpaceNut · 2016-11-12 22:20:45

fixed shifting in topic....

bumping topic as we have begun to talk materials

SpaceNut · 2020-08-20 18:57:06

wow missed a few on page 1 of topic....
but we can say that materials are just as important as to the shape of the habitat that we can make with them.

SpaceNut · 2021-11-24 17:29:03

Elon Musk Says We Need to Live in Glass Domes Before We Can Terraform Mars to support life, like Earth.” cb32eee22c4e41bd2b9150940b6e39e9

Musk, as has been well established, wants to realize his dream of making humans a multiplanetary species and build the first colony on Mars by 2050. To make the Red Planet habitable for life,
This isn’t the first time Musk has mentioned using glass domes as habitats on the Red Planet. In a 2016 Reddit AMA, Musk said glass panes with carbon fiber frames could be used to build geodesic domes on the Martian surface, while mining droids could build pressurized caves underground for industrial operations.

louis · 2021-11-24 19:44:09

Has he properly assessed the radiation risk? I doubt it...

I mean you might be able to have a smal dome with heavy, very thick glass panels but I doubt you could have a large one supporting such a mass, although I guess it will be a lot easier on Mars with its much lower G.

I think the gallery idea (proposed by someone here a while back) is probably better where you create a large space, maybe something like 40-60 foot deep with a well protected narrow glass roof would be better. (It's similar to my pressurised gorge idea for creating quasi-natural leisure spaces - Earth-like Environments.) The idea is you would then build houses, shops, offices, small parks and exercise areas and so on within the gallery space. This would mean there was extra protection against radiation. But there would be space to grow indoor trees, grass and so on. Supplementary artificial lighting would be required.

SpaceNut wrote:

Elon Musk Says We Need to Live in Glass Domes Before We Can Terraform Mars to support life, like Earth.”https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/eIzUQO66qVpz6xX_aW.YeQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTcwNTtoPTM1NDtjZj13ZWJw/https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/hThTdgT0ZwPUFc1afWSwuQ--~B/aD03MjM7dz0xNDQwO2FwcGlkPXl0YWNoeW9u/https://media.zenfs.com/en/hearst_mens_health_171/cb32eee22c4e41bd2b9150940b6e39e9
Musk, as has been well established, wants to realize his dream of making humans a multiplanetary species and build the first colony on Mars by 2050. To make the Red Planet habitable for life,
This isn’t the first time Musk has mentioned using glass domes as habitats on the Red Planet. In a 2016 Reddit AMA, Musk said glass panes with carbon fiber frames could be used to build geodesic domes on the Martian surface, while mining droids could build pressurized caves underground for industrial operations.

SpaceNut · 2021-11-24 20:21:44

I think some of the glass will have coatings while others will be made with lead and other such techniques to make it durable and capable of shielding. It will not be a single layer glass system but multiple with safety plastic sandwiched between some of the panes. Metal frames would be used to space the glass panes with atmospheric gaps to allow for relieving the pressure changes from inside the dome to the outside.

Mars_B4_Moon · 2022-09-01 17:36:07

A vision on Mars from fictional tv show

Why ‘For All Mankind’ creator Ron Moore dreamed up a clean, nuclear future
https://www.latimes.com/environment/new … ling-point

Notes from Mars 160: The Space Architecture of Yusuke Murakami
https://www.space.com/34963-mars-160-si … cture.html

Space Travel Troubles By Neil deGrasse Tyson
Natural History Magazine
September 1998
Published under the title “Space, You Can’t Get There From Here.”
https://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson … oubles.php
'The only things standing between us and interstellar travel are politics and money—and the need to travel at the speed of light.'

'the first self-sufficient and sustainable city on mars could house one million humans'
https://www.designboom.com/architecture … 3-22-2021/

ABIBOO studio has led the architectural design of a self-sufficient and sustainable city on mars that could house one million humans. ‘nüwa’ forms part of an exhaustive scientific work for a competition organized by the mars society, and fully developed by the SONet network, an international team of scientists and academics led by astrophysicist guillem anglada, who headed the discovery of exoplanet proxima-b. considering the atmospheric conditions, ABIBOO chose the side of a cliff on mars to build a vertical city, with the design and construction systems a result of the planet’s harsh conditions. ‘if we were to construct the buildings as on earth, the buildings would tend to explode from the pressure,’ says alfredo muñoz, founder of ABIBOO. ‘the solar and gamma radiation on mars forced us to build spaces that are not directly exposed to the sky.’

and

‘nüwa’ sits on the slope of one of the martian cliffs with abundant water access, with a steep terrain offering the opportunity to create a vertical city inserted into the rock, protected from radiation and exposed to indirect sunlight. ‘macro-buildings’ are excavations inside the rock of the cliff — implemented after tunneling, they are modular and include residential and work activities, linked together by a three-dimensional network of tunnels.

What it was like to pretend to live on Mars inside a dome for a year
https://mashable.com/video/mars-dome-hawaii
The dome is in Hawaii.

Mars_B4_Moon · 2023-07-02 05:26:15

Problem and Opportunity

https://www.humanmars.net/2023/06/spher … ny-by.html

Spherical underground Mars colony by Michel Lamontagne

The dome for such a structure should have heavy anchoring deep underground. But there is a much simpler solution - a spherical hermetic structure mostly underground where only the tip of the sphere (visible as a dome) is located above the ground level. Sphere is the strongest geometric shape for containing internal pressure and the structure can be kept in place by the mass put inside the sphere.
Canadian design engineer Michel Lamontagne has created two concept drawings for such a colony where there is only a domed park above the ground level and all the rest of the colony is located below the ground level with a vertical central opening for natural lighting:

Calliban · 2023-09-14 13:12:23

A cob house built within a dome in arctic Norway.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGDr3Xrv0Ko

Perhaps this could be a model for future housing units on Mars?

This dome looks to be about 15m in diameter. That is enough for a house and a modest sized garden. Whilst the dome itself was expensive, it fully protects the house from the wind and rain. The family were able to build the house from clay, straw and reclaimed wood, without having to worry about damp. The same would be true on Mars. The cost of the dome can be offset if the house inside is made from stone, mud brick and mud mortar. Without much in the way of soil moisture, there would be nothing to threaten the integrity of the house. The roof could be a cob or mud brick dome. It could be made deliberately thick to shield the interior from cosmic rays. Roof space can also serve as a potted garden and sitting area, so long as loads are controlled.

On Mars, domed houses like this would probably need supplemental heat, in addition to power, water and additional oxygen. The water would be heavily recycled. Transpiration would condense on the skin of the dome and run into gutters, draining into tanks for watering. Human waste woukd be broken down by anaerobic digestion, with methane being stored outside of the main dome and used for cooking. Plants within the dome would partially recycle the CO2 excreted into the air. If domed houses like this were built on large estates, each on say a 15m x 15m plot, then heat can be provided as piped hot water. A steel pipe would carry warm water from the base nuclear powerplant. The heat main would be laid in a shallow trench, with fine regolith piled over it to provide insulation. Electric power would be delivered by transmission lines, much as it is on Earth. One option worth considering is to provide mechanical power using hydraulics, with additional minor electrical needs met by offgrid solar PV. This avoids the need for electrical transmission and allows each house to operate on low voltage DC.

On Mars, the solid plexiglass dome would need to surround a pressure containing inner dome. This would be a UV resistant polymer, which would transfer load to a net of basalt fibers. The net would in turn transfer load to long steel piles, that are sunk into deep boreholes in the ground and anchored in place with injected concrete. Each house will have an air lock connecting it to the outside. This would be an underground trench structure, allowing atmospheric pressure to be balanced against static soil pressure.

One way of controlling cost would be to build thousands of these houses to a common design, with a high degree of automation. The domes wouod quickly become a mass produced product. The clay structure could actually be injected into moulds that are reused over and over. In this way, the pressure dome and basic structure of the house could be finished within a day. Interior furnishings, plumbing, electrics, floor tiles, etc, would take much longer. But all can be installed in a warm pressurised environment, probably by DIY. So houses like this could ultimately be built quite cheaply on Mars.

In the UK, a large terrace house has average floor area of 1087 sq.ft or about 100m2. Assuming the house is at the centre of the dome, there is just enough space under a 15m diameter dome for a 3 storey house. So the footprint of the house would be less than 20% of the enclosed area of the dome, allowing plenty of space for a vegetable garden and some planted trees. Alternatively, a larger house could be built without sacrificing garden space if roof gardens were made.
https://www.dwh.co.uk/advice-and-inspir … -sizes-uk/

Last edited by Calliban (2023-09-14 14:26:05)

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#76 2016-04-08 08:33:00

Re: Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

#77 2016-04-08 21:59:01

Re: Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

#78 2016-11-12 22:20:45

Re: Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

#79 2020-08-20 18:57:06

Re: Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

#80 2021-11-24 17:29:03

Re: Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

#81 2021-11-24 19:44:09

Re: Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

#82 2021-11-24 20:21:44

Re: Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

#83 2022-09-01 17:36:07

Re: Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

#84 2023-07-02 05:26:15

Re: Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

#85 2023-09-14 13:12:23

Re: Domed habitats... - ...size, materials, and more.

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