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Vermont City Almost Encased In a 1-Mile Dome
destinyland writes "A Vermont city once proposed a one-mile dome over its 7,000 residents. (They paid $4 million a year in heating bills, and HUD seriously considered funding their proposal.) The city's architectural concept included supporting the Dome with air pressure slightly above atmospheric pressure. (Buckminster Fuller warned their biggest challenge would be keeping it from floating away...) There would be no more heating bills, fly-fishing all year, and no more snow shoveling. And to this day, the former city planner insists that 'Economically it's a slam dunk.'"
You can't do this without outlawing combustion. While it's a nice theory to say that you'll be able to blow enough air through it, in practice the airflow in a dome is not like the airflow without a dome. And anyone who has been to Houston knows just how bad the air quality is, in fact, it is some of the worst in the USA. If you could remove Chinese pollution from the Jet Stream, it probably WOULD be the worst. Then again, if you put a dome over it, the city's residents could just gas each other to death, which would effectively stop them from polluting.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
TFA suggests that it would be held up by air pressure. That means that, not only do you have to worry about snow, but there's also the problem that if enough panels break to lower the interior pressure the dome could collapse. Or in a high-wind scenario the Bernoulli effect could burst it. You're also right that obviously the surface area of the dome would result in truly absurd heating costs and I suspect really terrible AC costs in the summer (greenhouse effect!); Vermont really does get a lot of summer.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
i think it's not so much about the need to heat the whole dome, but rather the fact that the dome would trap all the heat (and pollutants) inside the dome. The lack of air exchange would trap alot of the heat, pretty much exactly how a greenhouse works.
Frankly, I encourage these people to complete their dome. It'll reveal insight into how bad (or maybe good too?) the idea is and what can go wrong with them.
Also, it'll be good practice for when/if we decide to colonize extra-terran bodies. I don't think anyone has tried a larger-scale enclose ecosystem like this before (yes I know it won't be entirely enclosed.. but gotta start somewhere).
If you want to make little science, occasionally you have to break some beakers.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Why would they have to pipe all the water in? You can just as well channel it through the dome? Even channel it throught at night. What about insects and pollinators? They live fine in greenhouses. Why shouldnt they live in a dome. And who cares about migrating birds for such a small area?
I'm not sure that going from heating a few thousand little boxes to heating one giant dome really qualifies as "no heating bills".
Study up on the square-cube law and get back to us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law
Similarly, while shoveling snow off your driveway kind of sucks, it sure beats having snow build up on your habidome until the whole mess comes crashing down.
If the outside surface temperature never drops below freezing, due to above square-cube law... Also it seems no great challenge at all, to design buildings, even domes, that don't collapse under heavy snow loads.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Dude, it's a town of 7,000 people, the old ladies sitting on the porches will be sufficient to enforce any ban.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually the dome would have less surface area than the town. Take all the surface area of all the buildings and add it up. You will find that at makes a pretty good heat exchanger compared to a nice smooth dome.
Rain water? What a great resource. You would catch it falling all the dome and and use it. I could even be used for the drinking water. Same for the snow melt from the dome. If nothing else it could be used for irrigation.
Air Quality? Yes you would should ban cars from inside the city as well as fire places. You might not need to but it would probably be for the best if you did. For the dome to work you would want to have some pretty powerful air blowers to keep it pumped up. That should provide enough airflow for the air quality to be as good as a none domed town. Us air to air heat exchangers to allow for even more air flow when needed.
The one huge danger I see is fire. What is a building catches on fire? Is the dome fire proof? That risk could be reduced but if you are doing to dome an existing town you would have a lot of older buildings that may not be as fire safe as you would like.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If the dome is thin enough, and the ambient temperature is above freezing, snow would not collect. it would merely melt and run off.
The snow would melt, in that case, by transferring heat out of the dome. This negates the energy benefit, and will result in a giant ring of ice surrounding the dome. It also assumes that the snow will melt faster than it falls. VT can get a lot of snow all at once, a blizzard would still encase the dome, melted and refrozen ice on the bottom, snow on top.
The bigger problem, I think, is still getting water (for plants) and air into the dome, and pollutants from combustion out. Even if it is structurally possible, the additional logistical costs will outweigh the benefits enough that there is no net gain to a dome.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
There is a similar idea which actually carries some currency, though; put a greenhouse below a house and vent it into the house, then vent the exhaust from the house through a chimney. [...]
I don't really know but it seems to me that if you put a greenhouse underneath another building then not much sunlight would make it into the greenhouse.
Given that I actually live about 5 miles from where the whole Winooski Dome was planned to go this is all pretty well trodden territory here in this part of Vermont. The real killer problems are twofold. One is just that nobody has ever done it before and who wants to be first? In theory its a great idea, but its always the problem you didn't consider that bites you in the end. The second and more practical problem was always snow load. As anyone that has lived in Vermont can tell you, we get plenty of snow. Now pile it up a few feet deep on top of that dome, it adds up real fast. Nobody was ever sure exactly what would happen with all that snow or how long it would stay up there, etc. Roofs regularly collapse around here from snow load. You REALLY don't want to have that happen to your dome. That brings up what was the real final issue. What happens if something goes wrong? Its not just like you wasted a bunch of money. Having that dome come down on top of a whole town? That would be a big mess indeed...
Basically if the concept is ever going anywhere someone needs to build one way out in the middle of nowhere and figure out the basic problems first. Winooski residents wisely decided that being guinea pigs maybe isn't such a great idea.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
At just one percent of glass, ETFE is described as 99 percent nothing.
Then why didn't they name it "Congress"?
Because unlike Congress ETFE is transparent.
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Just cover all the streets with linear roofs
Your comment Gothmolly is ambiguous. So I should reply to both. As I am exactly the kind of engineer this sort of task requires.
On the surface it's good advice. Don't build something that can suffocate everyone who lives underneath it without some serious engineering.
On the other hand it's terrible advice. As an engineer, I want people who will share data (like the link from the poster) for everything they related thing they can find. I WANT them to share all their worries. As an engineer it's my job to prepare a list, and address each of them. There are lives at stake in these designs, and these worries should be addressed with math, not hubris.
The early history of powered flight is littered with the corpses of the brave. Perhaps some of them were uninterested in comments too...
It's not absurd for people to point it out as a possible problem.
True. And it's the most obvious problem with a fairly simple solution. It's the not so obvious problems, like the effect of sealing in plants that are dependant upon migratory pollenators and sealing out predators that feast on insects. What's going to happen to the ladybug population, for example?
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