If the power fails, the cables would fall down, right?
What sort of strain occurs at the outer edges where they are anchored to the ground/structure? Is it trying to pull itself from the structure due to Lorentz forces, or does it act more like a solid dome structure sitting on top of walls, held down by gravity?
I'm guessing the cables are in the open Martian atmosphere, not themselves a solid pressurized space, so we don't have to worry about buoyancy ripping them off their moorings, just balancing gravity / mass of the structure and Lorentz forces (and any anti-sag/collapse reinforcements to protect against power loss).
Quote from: biosehnsucht on 03/09/2018 09:06 pmIf the power fails, the cables would fall down, right?They're superconductors, so the power cables themselves need no power supply once charged.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2-Generation-High-Temperature-Superconductor-tape_50013334401.html I find it amusing it's now off-the-shelf.
That's very interesting, if the failure mode due to loss of power is just a gradual settling, might not do any damage to structures below.
Though I'd still think some kind of basic support would be good in case of some kind of damage that stops the superconducting flow ?
Of course many methods of cable management are conceivable. What methods might be better?
Quote from: LMT on 03/13/2018 12:53 amOf course many methods of cable management are conceivable. What methods might be better?Don't insulate the cable stacks from each other?Or provide shorting bridges very regularly?
Quote from: speedevil on 03/13/2018 01:36 amQuote from: LMT on 03/13/2018 12:53 amOf course many methods of cable management are conceivable. What methods might be better?Don't insulate the cable stacks from each other?Or provide shorting bridges very regularly?Hmm. Are you thinking of some in-cable quench protection method, perhaps? But wouldn't the stack contacts also remove redundancy, by spreading hotspots across tape stacks? Can you expand a bit? Thanks.
Quote from: LMT on 03/13/2018 02:59 pmQuote from: speedevil on 03/13/2018 01:36 amQuote from: LMT on 03/13/2018 12:53 amOf course many methods of cable management are conceivable. What methods might be better?Don't insulate the cable stacks from each other?Or provide shorting bridges very regularly?Hmm. Are you thinking of some in-cable quench protection method, perhaps? But wouldn't the stack contacts also remove redundancy, by spreading hotspots across tape stacks? Can you expand a bit? Thanks.If your cable is in one enclosure with one thermal environment, heat from a quenched strand is going to be shared across all strands, so if you've got enough heat to make a hotspot spread, then it risks spreading across the whole cable.If however, the strands are tied together electrically occasionally, what happens instead is as that as one spot quenches, the current is immediately taken up by the other strands, and there is no generated heat, as there is no current flow in the cable that's gone resistive, leading to the possibility that it can become superconducting again if there was some transitory issue. I need to think about this properly and read the above paper in more depth.
Excavating a portion of Hellas Planitia deep enough that the surface pressure is above the Armstrong Limit.
I did a search and found this calculation by RobotBeat:Quote from: Robotbeat on 06/18/2010 06:40 pmExcavating a portion of Hellas Planitia deep enough that the surface pressure is above the Armstrong Limit.
Robobeat calculates about 18 km deep below Hellas basin to get enough pressure but doesn't consider the natural temperature of the rock at that depth. On Earth, rock temperature goes up quickly with depth and I don't think Mars is totally dead. I don't know what the temperature gradient is though.
KelvinZero's idea, posted elsewhere, of just filling the elevator shaft with water would be easier.
convert the elevator car to a bathysphere