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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.'"
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
Didn't they try something like this in Springfield? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Movie
Absent the proper climate controls, under the right conditions: it can rain inside a huge dome like that, as water vapor collects near the roof.
It'd be nasty rain though, polluted no doubt.
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.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
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.
Put a dome over the dome as a windbreak.
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
You have a dome with a bunch of air in it, right? It has to be exchanged with fresh air, right? Now the city can tax the air their citizens people breath.
It is brilliant, really. They've finally found a way to tax the air we breathe!!
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.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
This would just lead to big arguments between the men and women of the town.
Absolutely not true. Here in Quebec, the roof of the Olympic Stadium is a similar deal, and huge hot-air guns are needed to try to melt the snow - and when it's not fast enough, it has to be removed mechanically, or the roof fails (and then they have to get out these huge mechanical "clothespins" to hold the edges together until it can be fixed.
Go by any ice rink in the summer and look at the pile of snow outside from the Zamboni ... snow just doesn't melt as fast as you think, even in 80 degree heat. Also, snow's a half-decent insulator (trapped air), so good luck melting a foot of snow.
Just cover all the streets with linear roofs
For most of New England, perhaps. In New Hampshire, (from my High School civics 1982), City means there are elected officials running the government. Town have town meetings where *everyone* votes on the issues.
NH has 13 cities: Berlin, Claremont, Concord, Dover, Franklin, Keene, Laconia, Lebanon, Manchester, Nashua, Portsmouth, Rochester, Somersworth.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_town#Cities "Most cities are former towns that changed to a city form of government because they grew too large to be administered by a town meeting."
FWIW, I'm originally from Lebanon, NH which is on the border with Hartford, VT.