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Designing Wireless Sensors To Be Dropped Into Volcanoes
Thorfinn.au writes with this quote from El Reg:
"Topflight engineers based in Newcastle have hit upon a radical plan for warning of volcanic eruptions. They intend to build a heatproof sensor unit which can be dropped into a volcano's caldera and wirelessly transmit data to monitoring stations despite being possibly immersed in molten rock. 'At the moment we have no way of accurately monitoring the situation inside a volcano and in fact most data collection actually goes on post-eruption. With an estimated 500 million people living in the shadow of a volcano this is clearly not ideal,' explains Dr. Alton Horsfall of Newcastle Uni's Centre for Extreme Environment Technology. 'We still have some way to go but using silicon carbide technology we hope to develop a wireless communication system that could accurately collect and transmit chemical data from the very depths of a volcano.'"
Have we run out of virgins already?
Have gnu, will travel.
Finally, Scientology will be vindicated!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This is just the government trying to "pre-bug" those granite slabs right from the quarry.
I know a few netgear routers I'd love to punt into a volcano.
Even if the package is heat-proof, the electronics are going to fry.
Bobby Jindal mocked volcano monitoring shortly before the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull and some other one in the US. No, can't find the name of the US one right now. But this was after Obama's first State of the Union Address.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
... do we really need a Lord of the Rings remake?
It's dolomite, baby! The mineral that won't cop out when the heat is all about.
- Professor Farnsworth
My work here is dung.
So the sensor is going to look like a big golf ball? I guess that will be one tough course. "And Tiger Woods is puling a long drive down the middle of Krakatowa... ohhh, and he's in the lava! That will be tough shot out, what do you think John?" "He might need a #2 wedge for that one, Bob".
volcano information recorder going into netherworld
Venus, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead, has proven a tough nut to crack for probes hoping to return information about its awesomely hellish surface. But if we're talking about a small probe that can transmit while bobbing around like a cork in a lake of liquid rock... well, mere "lead-melting" heat should be a walk in the park for that little critter.
Send a craft with a few hundred of these guys in its hold, drop 'em on the surface, and find out what's going on with our evil-twin-sister planet. I especially want to know what's going on with the Venusian highlands, where there seems to be a radar-reflecting "frost" of heavy metals coating the ground. Even if all these probes can tell us is how blisteringly hot it is, that's got to tell us *something* about the environment. Venus sounds like a metal-ore refinery, and I'd love for someone to decide that it's worth a few (hundred) billion bucks to go get some of that Unobtanium (or whatever) and bring it back to Earth.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
SPECTRE's not gonna like this... Where will they hide their rockets?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SPECTRE.jpg
i've seen amazing things, so i'm not going to say it's impossible... but landing on the moon is cake in comparison.
I think the more interesting aspect of what they are proposing isn't so much that they're building a super-durable sensor rig that can withstand the heat of liquid magma, but rather how they propose to transmit through several feet of liquid hot rock. They must pack one hell of a powerful transmitter into the probe.
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Why not just send Bender? After all, he's 40% dolemite!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I'm convinced that D-link has been making wireless gear for this for years. I frequently find that this may be the only use for their wireless equipment.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Or an extremely sensitive receiver near the volcano edge. Perhaps using extremely low frequency signals to get through the dense molten/solid rock? Slow as hell bitrate though =(
Adds a whole new meaning to hot spots.
Ill bet its running linux and someone will have a hack for it within a week.
If they can power it with the heat available in the volcano. How does the thermo work out for running a cooler powered by ambient temperature and dumping the created heat back.
Yeah - good point. I was wondering the same thing. It's one thing to dunk a sensor into molten rock and have it continue to function. It's another to get it to transmit through the heat/density/whatever above it. Hmm. On the plus side if they have anything that can convert heat to electricity they'll have power to spare (though they'll need to setup some kind of a heat differential somehow as best I understand thermodyanmics).
Wouldn't it be a treat if they discovered an Angel down there? Then we'd finally have a reason for emo teens to pilot mechs!
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Maybe they'd drop several at different points/heights and establish a mesh network. That way, as long as you could reach one sensor you could reach all or most of the sensors that are still operational.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
According to Horsfall and his fellow nails-tough tech developers, their carbide electronics can keep working up to temperatures of 900C. This is actually sufficient to withstand immersion in some lavas/magmas, though by no means all. In any case it's difficult to see how any wireless signal could be transmitted through molten minerals, so presumably the inventors are talking more about locating their kit in places within a caldera which - although extremely hot - are not enough so to actually melt rock.
The caldera is not a synonym for lava puddles. They're talking about putting a sensor in the caldera where it can detect gasses. It's not likely to be floating, much less submerged, and in fact that would presumably interfere with the mission of detecting various gasses.
(I've only read the article, not the papers)
I guess Sauron should have thought of this.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
And why not just scoop some molten rock out in a bucket and test it outside the volcano?
Is molten rock all that conductive or much of a dielectric? If not, then it wouldn't be much different than passing a radio wave through several layers of concrete (walls). This will be much easier than trying to transmit out from water, a conductive and very dielectric material.
Are you making your own semiconductors?
I am curious if it is possible to use doping levels on the chips that would allow them to work at high temperatures while not necessarily working at room temperature.
Perhaps you could get with NASA. I bet they would need something similar for exploring Venus.
Britney Spears may be able to enlighten us on the subject. http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm
Turns out the customer was one of the research labs (LANL or something, I forget which). They were measuring nuclear reactions, and using these scopes because they had a particular kind of sensor, but the tests were destructive, and every time they ran the experiment (once a week), they vaporized a scope. I think they figured out a way to sell the customer the sensor without wrapping it in all the fancy scopey packaging.
Lava-Cooled computer with wireless connection, who said we don't live in the future.
FTA:
According to Horsfall and his fellow nails-tough tech developers, their carbide electronics can keep working up to temperatures of 900C. This is actually sufficient to withstand immersion in some lavas/magmas, though by no means all.
Apparently they aren't using Silicon based electronics so they don't need to keep the sensor that cool (at least from a silicon point of view). But even if the electronics can handle it I'm still not entirely sure what they would use to power it all (Sodium Nickel Chloride battery typically work between 270 and 350C, other molten salt batteries used in missile systems typically operate between 400-550C).
One Sensor to connect them all, One Sensor to find them,
One sensor to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
Would it be able to use a Token ring protocol?
Unobtanium
What could possibly go wrong?
Molten rock can have almost any chemical composition, just like solidified rock. So the answer is "yes".
Seems to me that this is a good X-Prize candidate...
Great! Now we will have a "you're going to die in 30 seconds" sensor to go along with the "replace engine" indicator light in our cars!!
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The short answer is magma is conductive. Look up melting a beer bottle in a microwave to learn why.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
What, there aren't enough guys on cellphones asking "Can you hear me now?" to drop into volcanoes? You don't need a fancy probe to detect wireless signals.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Smoke signals
Just watch episode 15 of season 1 of seaQuest... I'm pretty sure all your questions will be answered.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
Yeah, we did this on SeaQuest in in 1993-4. Season 1, eps 103 & 116- The Devil's WIndow and Greed for a Pirate's Dream.
Transmitting signals wirelessly through ocean water presents many of the same difficulties. There is already a very well developed technology for doing this based on sound. The transmitters are usually trivial to build. The tough part is the receiver because in order to get high data rates, you have to go to great lengths to compensate for extreme multipath distortion (echoes).
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
and the "preventing your equipment from melting" problem, how do you solve the "transmitting signals through molten rock" problem?
Yeah, it would be cool for someone to decide that. Trouble is, it's almost certainly not true. Someone did the math here on Slashdot once before (in the context of mining Mars) and came to the conclusion that even if there were bricks of solid platinum lying about on the surface of Mars, it wouldn't be economically feasible to recover them (given realistic estimates of the costs involved in going to get them and bring them back). Going to Venus would be even worse, both because of the extreme environmental conditions there and the fact that the metals are not, in all probability, lying about in the form of preprocessed bricks.
Sure, there absolutely is... in water. Doing the same thing in magma: not so well developed. All the tech we have for doing sonar and underwater comms would melt at these temperatures, and it's not clear what substitute materials you could use that would survive. This would require a major amount of engineering research to figure out, and I doubt anyone could stomach the cost.
And even if you could figure that out, the sonic environment within the magma lake has got to be terrible - weird thermal gradients, high background noise, the multipath effects you mention... it's a very hard problem.
All in all I think this is a tremendously unlikely solution to the problem.
Has anyone made the wireless hotspot joke yet?
The whole point of the story is to make the electronics heat-proof. Apparently silicon-carbide electronics can function at much higher temperatures than ordinary silicon.
Did they consider the direction of the flow of molten rock? It will be like trying to drop a pea into a gushing fire hydrant.
If they want something that will survive being covered by lava, they could try tantalum hafnium carbide.
Or, alternatively, they could use dolomite.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
What might a heat proof container let an instrument measure? I'm guessing temp is out of the question.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Why allow it to be buried? Why not design it to float on the magma, antenna up, sensors down. It would be pretty easy to do, since magma is very dense.
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