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.'"

Comments

Houston Has Similar Plans

[eldavojohn]

I saw a Discovery channel special on mega-engineering and the plans to cover Houston with a dome were quite a shock to me (here's a brief non-flash writeup). I'll bet you're wondering what those panels are made of:

But the answer comes from German city of Bremen, from a company dubbed Vector Foil. Vector Foil manufactures an innovative strong, lightweight, transparent polymer known as ethylene tetra fluoro ethylene (ETFE). At just one percent of glass, ETFE is described as 99 percent nothing. And considering that it can withstand winds of 180 miles per hour, it could be the breakthrough for the Houston Dome.

I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt. At least it's a long long way off if they follow through.

Re:Houston Has Similar Plans

[mysidia]

Hm... only Hydrogen-powered cars allowed to enter or leave the dome.

Only electric yard equipment allowed.

The trouble is the difficulty enforcing that..

I suppose hidden surveillance cameras and combustion detecters could be mounted to the underside of the dome at regular intervals to detect any infractions.

Re:Houston Has Similar Plans

[motorcyclemaintain]

So did Walt Disney. The original plans for EPCOT in Disney World included a massive translucent dome covering the "community" and its twenty thousand residents.

EPCOT "would be a testbed for city planning and organization. A giant dome was to have covered the community, so as to regulate its climate (this idea was later seen in the 1998 movie The Truman Show). The community was to have been built in the shape of a circle, with businesses and commercial areas at its center, community buildings and schools and recreational complexes around it, and residential neighborhoods along the perimeter. Transportation would have been provided by monorails and People Movers (like the one in the Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland). Automobile traffic would be kept underground, leaving pedestrians safe above-ground."

Re:Houston Has Similar Plans

[radtea]

I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt.

I just get a blank page when I click on the link, so I'm not sure what the physical footprint of the town is, but when you consider modern sports stadia the ability to cover an area say 1 km across doesn't seem out of place. Modern materials are incredibly strong, and I would expect this dome would be designed as something like a kevlar rope net with panels in the holes to seal it. The internal atmospheric pressure will then keep the net under tension, and everything is good.

There is one big problem with it, which is that any failure is a catastrophic failure, albeit a catastrophe in slow motion. Unexpectedly high snow load, hurricane force winds, rocks falling from the sky and human error can all take structures of this kind down. I've seen two soccer domes fail under snow load (one was patchable and reinflatable) and know of another that was in the general vicinity of a tornado (nothing remained, although it was not actually hit by the tornado, it was just in the general area.)

As every engineer knows, if something can fail, it will. Domes like this can fail, therefore this one will. If the mean time between failure can be made long enough, it could still be worth-while, but I'd want to be sure that there was a re-inflation drill once a year or so (which policy would last for about a decade until some idiot in a suit realized they could pay themselves more today by leaving the people of tomorrow unprepared.)

There's also an interesting ecological twist: the ecosystem under the dome obviously can't be the local one, so you would have to replace a lot of vegetation with stuff that can survive without winter, and since the dome would inevitably become home to various exotic plants and animals it would be a continual source of invaders into the local ecosystem (which wouldn't survive the winter, but which would make every spring and summer a new surprise.)

Re:Houston Has Similar Plans

[drinkypoo]

The town from TFA was about 7,000 people. They said they would just use electric cars. Or a monorail.

That's nice. I'm talking about Houston, which has a lot more than 7,000 people... Although it probably wouldn't if they put a dome on it. Please try to keep up. In any case, there are numerous combustion sources besides internal combustion engines. Also, heavier-than-air combustion gases of all types (e.g. from cooking on the stove... there is no way I'm moving to Electric) would congregate in low places without winds to redistribute air. So now, you'll need air circulation fans installed on every street corner, as big as wind turbines; or they'll need to be installed in every house, and engineered to actually produce airflow instead of leaving dead pockets like most central air systems do. And unless you're planning to outlaw all combustible gases (like butane and propane, welding torches, et cetera) those fans had better be explosion-proof.

It's a fucking stupid idea on any scale. It would work on Mars, because you can reasonably outlaw combustible gases. You won't want to use them anyway, because you will have a limited supply of oxygen for the foreseeable future. It won't work here on Earth, at least not until we grow up a little more, and develop power storage technologies which can actually rival chemical fuels.

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. When the greenhouse is too hot, the air is just vented outside. Convection will draw air through the house, and the greenhouse can act as a particulate filter (and a CO2 scrubber/oxygen plant.) Periodic water washes (a rain system would be ideal) cleanse the dust from the plants; if it's soft-set on dirt then mycelium can handle fixing toxics captured this way. This doesn't get you away from weather, but it can dramatically cut heating costs in certain environments. It's not a one-size-fits-all fix, but nothing is.

Re:Houston Has Similar Plans

[Anonymous Coward]

People + Houses = Hamlet
Hamlet + Road = Village
Village + Livestock Market = Town
Town + Cathedral = City

I'm not sure why you throw numbers around. ;)

Re:Houston Has Similar Plans

[drinkypoo]

Sorry, I meant downslope. I used "beneath" to mean "at a lower elevation."

By the way, I also advocate replacing roofs with greenhouses. Even polycarbonate panels (let alone fiberglass ones) can last better than ten years at a cost dramatically lower than "traditional" truss-and-shingle roofing, and with a lower replacement cost when viewed from almost any angle, including shipping, labor, and materials. Using bare-root aeroponics keeps weight to an absolute minimum and solar panels and their associated equipment (both for water heat and electrical generation) can be mounted over load-bearing exterior walls. These walls could as easily be the walls of a currently standing house as they could be made of straw bales, rammed earth, earth bags, adobe, or some other highly durable minimum-energy material.

In tropical climates you can put a little (okay, a lot) more effort into load-bearing in the roof, and implement a "green roof" with soil. So long as no deep-root crops are grown (careful weeding may be required!) food can be produced here. But this is a substantially higher-maintenance option and probably not really advisable for most of the Western world even where the climate permits.

If you are constructing the entire dwelling, in many parts of the world it is also possible to gather most or even all of your yearly water needs in a sub-floor cistern with the same footprint as your house, collected solely from roof runoff. If you are building with adobe or rammed earth, this can be achieved at relatively little additional cost.

The issue of local food production is only going to become more relevant to all of us interested in eating nourishing food as time goes by. And even if it were not necessary, it would be wise to implement some or all of these means to simply reduce the environmental cost of food production.

Re:Houston Has Similar Plans

[MrNemesis]

Nothing is incredibly strong stuff though - witness that it's almost impossible to tear toilet paper or a cheque book along the perforated lines, clearly indicating that less matter means a stronger material. I hypothesize that if we could find a way to remove 99.999999% of the matter from, say, common or garden steel we'd have something as tough as neutronium whilst weighing the same as a dried Mexican Staring Frog.

However, I'm convinced someone has stolen my idea and already incorporated it into modern blister packs.

Re:Houston Has Similar Plans

[Shotgun]

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I have built most of an airplane and studied a lot of aerodynamics in the process. The one thing I can say for certain is that ETFE cannot withstand a wind of 180mph, nor can any other "material". Materials don't withstand forces. Structures do. I can stick a cube of this stuff on the nose of an SR-71 and claim it survives Mach 4.5. Or I can make a sheet so thin that it comes apart in a slight breeze.

The statement you quoted is quite as meaningless as you surmised.

So...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not sure that going from heating a few thousand little boxes to heating one giant dome really qualifies as "no heating bills". 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.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Very easy, diminishing the media through which heat is exchanged: external area and air. It is easy to argue that a big dome offers much less area than the total area given by all the buildings in the town. In addition, a similar argument can be applied to air exchange, in both cases you are saving.

Re:So...

[Xest]

The heating costs wouldn't be as bad because you get a lot of thermal energy stored in the ground from the sun during the day.

Effectively you are just manually replicating the greenhouse effect.

It's something I've experimented with my greenhouse (as I live in the UK and grow tropical plants which must be kept at a minimum of 15c all year around). It's suprising how effective storage of heat in the ground and such actually is and I also now keep water cooler sized bottles of water around the greenhouse walkway and under the staging through the winter to hold sun during the day which is then released through the night, it's not a massive change, but it has certainly made a measurable difference to my electric heating costs- my thermostat based electric heaters now need to come on for much less time through the night.

I'm sure there's actually probably a better substance than water for the purpose, but this was really just a small experiment. I can certainly see though from this how harnessing natural heat storage of pavements, ponds, roads, rivers, outer walls of buildings and so on could all hold heat built up during the day from the sun to drastically help heat such a dome through the night.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This could be taken care of by passing air in and out through heat exchangers. Get the benefits of ample ventilation, but keep most your heat in. There already are sealed super-energy-efficient houses that use this technology, that can stay warm in winter simply utilizing the waste heat from humans, appliances, and other activities -- and unlike the highly insulated houses of decades past, they have plenty of fresh air to boot.

Stephen King

[Doches]

They'd better wait and read Stephen King's Under the Dome first...

Rain? Insects? Birds?

[sherriw]

And how much will it cost when ALL their water needs for lawns and parks and such need to be piped in? Not to mention that many plants need some of the water to fall on the leaves not just the roots.

What about insects and pollinators? Birds that fly south?

This is not very well thought out.

Re:Rain? Insects? Birds?

[MrBulwark]

Remember, it is still raining, just above the dome. It should be trivial to put collectors at teh base of the dome. I would hazzard a guess that it would provide the city with more water than they have currently. My concern would be the long-term durability of the "glass". After 20 years, will it yellow? Will it be so scratched up that everything outside will be a blur? Who is going to climb up there and clean all the bird poop off of it?

No rain

[rastilin]

No rain though, that's a plus if you live in the city and don't have a lawn. I'm sure you can have birds and insects inside the dome.

Re:No rain

[c_sd_m]

Pollination? What would all the old people do when they can't grow flowers? Any farms that you're driving out of business? There's the whole ecosystem thing too: which bugs can you manage to exclude and what they did eat that's now running rampant? But if it means no raccoons assaulting garbage cans, I suppose it's worth it.

there might be rain. insects, birds

[goombah99]

You can get rain in large enclosed spaces. it's condesate. You might not want that raining on you. everything from evaporated dog urine, to aerosol diesel exahust, to flu viruses coming back down. Of course that happens now, but it's dillluted and also purified by the UV.

Now that said. I don't see why a dome has to have an impermeable ceiling. You could arrange things so that natural rain could be let in.

You could make the roof like a salmon ladder on a dam. there is some exchange with the outside air. just not wide open.

Lessons From Biosphere II

[smitty777]

I think this is one of those things that look good on paper, but...

There are so many ways this could go wrong. It might be a way to breed viruses into an entire city, or keep carcinogens trapped for all to breathe. The Biosphere II was a fairly disastrous small scale experiment along these lines. Just imagine having an "oops" moment for a city of 5.7 million.

Unpowered flight

[AliasMarlowe]

I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt. At least it's a long long way off if they follow through.

Thats what people thought about powered flight. Maybe you should leave this sort of thing to the engineers.

If they were planning to keep the inside air warmer than the outside air, then they'd find themselves covered by the top half of a hot-air balloon.
The outside air can change temperature very quickly. In winter it can shift by more than 20C between day and night here in Finland, and New England could be similar. Balancing the thermal buoyancy of the air with the mass of the dome would need some skill and unreasonably fast temperature controls to prevent lift-off or collapse. It's feasible for smaller domes, but at the kilometer scale it would be a real challenge. Buckminster Fuller was right - it would need good tethering to keep it down at times. The membrane tensions might also be quite large in places, with interesting dynamics, so that the mechanical design near tethers would also be interesting.

Re:I love this idea, but it's STOOOOOOPID

[Alsee]

I certainly agree that it would be quite difficult to make it cost effective, however most of your comments are pretty far off base. It may be impractical, but it's not nearly as absurd as you indicate.

One punk with a gun decides to piss on everybody's day.

And no one cares.

You would probably have to put a few hundred thousand bullet holes before it became danger. A hundred thousand bullet holes works out to one hole per 270 square feet - about two-thousandth of one percent of the surface area. Or more significantly it works out to one bullet hole per fifty-five thousand cubic feet of air. Even if each bullet hole leaked ten cubic feet of low-pressure warm air per minute, it would take nearly four days for a hundred thousand bullet holes to leak the air inside. And that is neglecting the fact that the rising warm air escaping through the holes will likely be completely replaced by cool air drawn in at the bottom. If someone puts a hundred thousand bullet holes in it, you simply close normal exhaust vent at the top. And that's even without any active intake fans. If you do have some sort of emergency fan building on the perimeter you could keep it up long enough to make repairs even if there is a fairly catastrophic hole. Another important note is that holes near the bottom don't much matter - there is essentially zero pressure difference at ground level and air wouldn't bother "leaking" out the hole. The most significant place for holes would be at the top where the hot air balloon effect is pushing up on the top.

The expenses of building such a thing would be astronomical.

Expensive, yes. Astronomical? No...

building an air-tight wall around the city

You don't need an air tight wall. I don't know exactly what sort of perimeter that were planning, but to understand this sort of structure you need to understand that they could in fact build something like this with no wall at all. You could build something like this with an arbitrary hight open perimeter, with nothing more than occasional ropes tying the edges down. The plastic roof sheet would act like a hot air balloon, more than supporting its own weight. Running the roof sheet right down to the ground as a vertical wall would give you much more control of the inside conditions, but you are still going to need pretty big openings to let airflow in, and some pretty significant controllable vents to let hot air escape at the top.

managing water

The dome inherently functions as an enormous fresh water rain capture system for the covered area. It's conceivable the water issue might actually work out to be a small net positive compared to conventional municipal water systems.

managing ... waste and air control for an entire square mile contained environment would require exotic technologies

We're not talking some sort of hermetically sealed biodome :D
You would have stricter controls on fires and other gaseous emissions, but in general I don't see "waste" control being much different. Yes you'd have air control systems, but upening vents at the top to allow hot hair to naturally escape and opening essentially "giant windows" to let air flow in are hardly "exotic technologies".

I've seen cities fly billions of dollars over budget trying to do relatively simple things like bury an ugly highway running through the city, or prepare to host the Olympic games.

Yes, trying to tunnel a highway under a city is freaking expensive, and constructing a city's worth of complex Olympic facilities is expensive. However to oversimplify, we are basically talking about a huge but fairly simple sheet of plastic with probably kevlar ropes for tiedown and reinforcement. Yes yes, a simplification, but not grossly far off. Yes there's the water system - but that isn't very complex and it is offset by the fact that it supplements/replaces the old municipal system.

It's expensive, probably not cost effective, but not f