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Old 05-24-2020, 10:00 AM   #11
Daigoro
 
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Default Re: [Cyberpunk Engineering Challenge] #2 Typhoon Abatement Platform

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Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
The last point is the problem. The energy in a typhoon is immense, and extracting it has you working on the wrong end of the second law of thermodynamics.
Nonetheless, there have been a variety of suggestions on how to reduce cyclone effects, ranging from serious to somewhat kooky. I'll work through some below.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dcarson View Post
Maybe a floating OTEC plant so there is less of a warm layer of water to power a typhoon in the first place. The generated power can be used for propulsion and pumping up more cold water.
That's one strategy I've come across.
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Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 View Post
For believability, whatever it does should probably need time to work, not ending the storm all at once but gradually degrading it over hours and days. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if this thing needed to be inside the eye of the storm to work. That's where the 'engine' is, after all. So using it might involve bringing it through the storm walls into the eye before it can be used. I see adventure possibilities.
Indeed. That's why I'm picturing an ocean-going platform under propulsion that can intercept a cyclone then move with the eye-wall over the course of its lifetime.
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Originally Posted by PTTG View Post
Maybe the "tower" is a earthside facility controlling (tens/hundreds of) thousands (millions) of statites over the pacific ocean. The control system can redirect sunlight away from the region or towards other areas, making wind currents and pressure systems to redirect and reduce the power of typhoons.
There are probably a few more realistic options than this idea, but there's a lot less drama in a tower heist on an earthside facility in calm weather than assaulting one in the middle of the Pacific in a Cat-5 storm. Also, are those statites described able to geosynch over one location that's not one of the poles?
Quote:
Alternatively, the tower could be almost entirely a fusion-powered carbon scrubbing system. The lower levels might be doing the most work (in the denser atmosphere), with the upper levels being support and clean-air exhaust.
This is a bit more dramatic, but it's more in line with a separate idea I have for climate-punk megastructures, of updraft towers scattered across the monsoon belt. So hang on to that, it might be useful in a later thread.

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
It's probably easier to deflect typhoons than to disrupt them, but they're affected by the terrain they're passing over, so sufficiently large megastructures should affect them.
The problem is defining "sufficiently large." This megastructure should be quite large, but I don't picture it mimicking the effect of a land-mass to be a significant method of storm reduction.

----
Abatement Strategies
For those following along, here are a few sources to look at:I haven't settled on which strategies the facility would use, but, considering the size of the platform, I'm thinking that it would be an experimental test-bed with a smorgasbord of different techniques for them to try and measure their effect.

Power Extraction
My initial, naive idea was that the whole platform is a giant pinwheel that is allowed to rotate in the cyclone and thus absorb a large amount of the storm's angular momentum. Is that plausible, or semi-plausible even?

The X-Seed 4000 building is supposed to weigh 3,000,000 tons, so how much effect would a T-CATCH of a similar weight have if it could rotate? This energy could be converted to electricity for storage at the central axis of the tower.

I haven't seen anything to completely rule out this strategy, but I haven't run any sums. The structure would have to have the fins of the pinwheel be fairly high at the edges if this method is viable, and this is the main impetus for imagining the structure to be so large.

Leaving that idea aside, the structure could be covered with egg beater-like non-directional wind turbines for capturing a significant amount of energy, though unlikely enough to slow the storm down.

Surface Cooling Strategies
Many of the modification ideas in my reading focus on the heat exchange between the surface of the ocean and the cyclone. It's not clear, though, if this is only viable in the path of an oncoming cyclone or if the process would have an effect inside the eye-wall.

There's the OTEC idea from above, pumping cool water from depths of 500m-1000m up to the surface. A related idea is to spray the eye-wall with diffused sea water. These would be fairly doable with the platform.

Ice or liquid nitrogen could be used to cool the water surface. The diameter of the platform could have long submerged refrigerating fins for this method, though disposing the amount of heat absorbed may be difficult. I recall seeing some talk of a laser-based heat sink that could expel the energy upwards into deep space, but to my frustration I can't find any sources for it now.

On lasers, there's also some talk that they can be used to cool the water surface. Wikipedia calls it "laser inversion", but the sources linked aren't directly relevant so I don't know how realistic this would be.

Lightning Discharge
Lightning could be provoked to discharge from the storm along ionised pathways. These can be generated via rockets spraying ions, large ion emitters, or with an electrolaser effect. I guess the mechanism for abatement here is that the lightning "drains" the storm of its energy load. In any case, extracting energy from the lightning is another (theoretical) method for the platform to gain power, either into capacitors, hydrogen power cells or other methods.

Project Stormfury Pt II
In the 60s, the US attempted to use silver iodide cloud seeding to create a secondary eye wall at a greater radius than the primary, in the outer bands of the cyclone. The theory is that the outer eye wall would have a lower pressure gradient and thus be weaker than the concentrated eye wall. The T-CATCH could do this itself at a greater scale than with the original two B-17s and a B-29. Instead of silver iodide, dry ice or sodium chloride can be used, and I imagine some kind of nanocarbon could also have the same effect. Otherwise, there's lasers again. There are a few mentions of using high power (terawatt) lasers for cloud seeding, so that might be a better method for this.

And instead of the platform doing the cloud seeding, it could be a carrier for a fleet of short range drones or piloted aircraft to circle in the targeted storm band and carry out heavy seeding or laser activation.

There are also mentions of using soot to heat clouds at the top of the storm, reducing the convection currents with a similar mechanism to Stormfury.

Vortex Disruption
Finally, one suggestion is to use jet turbines to blow powerful wind counter to the cyclone's direction and disrupt it's circulation. This wouldn't neutralise the storm per se, but I could imagine it breaking the storm up into smaller cyclones? Regular jet turbines would not be sufficient. These would have to have massive diameters with some kind of additional heating or acceleration mechanism.

----
Whether any of these mechanisms would have enough effect to abate a storm is up for debate, but as this Fox (sorry!) article suggests, with enough computing power, a cyclone could be steered by strategically affecting wind strengths.

So, which of these methods seem most viable or plausible? Which would be most interesting to have in use? Should the platform be equipped for all or most of them, or should it just focus on one or two main methods?
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Old 05-24-2020, 10:10 AM   #12
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Default Re: [Cyberpunk Engineering Challenge] #2 Typhoon Abatement Platform

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Originally Posted by dcarson View Post
Maybe a floating OTEC plant so there is less of a warm layer of water to power a typhoon in the first place. The generated power can be used for propulsion and pumping up more cold water.
This has some merit and the later post about the statites too.

I have no particular use for a tower though. Windbreaks are too localized to be of much use. Even a vertical windmill the size of the world's largest building would be of virtually no use. Perhaps it could be a turbo-sail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcyone_(ship)

for the OTEC plant.
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Old 05-24-2020, 10:18 AM   #13
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Default Re: [Cyberpunk Engineering Challenge] #2 Typhoon Abatement Platform

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Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
N

Power Extraction
My initial, naive idea was that the whole platform is a giant pinwheel that is allowed to rotate in the cyclone and thus absorb a large amount of the storm's angular momentum. Is that plausible, or semi-plausible even?

T?
Nope. the typhoon is probably hundreds of kilometers across. Even if your tower is one km in diameter it just isn't interacting with enough of the storm.

The "lightning" idea would only work as part of a magical ritual. You hadn't mentioned magic.

Your principla problem is one of scale and buildings and typhoons are not items of similar scales.
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Old 05-24-2020, 10:54 AM   #14
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Default Re: [Cyberpunk Engineering Challenge] #2 Typhoon Abatement Platform

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Nope. the typhoon is probably hundreds of kilometers across. Even if your tower is one km in diameter it just isn't interacting with enough of the storm.
I haven't got to talking about the size and engineering of the structure, but I'm thinking about 4-5 km tall, compared to a cyclone being 12-15 km high. The radius would be 2-5 km, with a cyclone's eye being 30-60 km across, so it's a little more significant than you're suggesting. I'm not saying it's enough, but I'm not convinced it isn't enough either.
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The "lightning" idea would only work as part of a magical ritual. You hadn't mentioned magic.
That's from here.
Robert Dickerson, a senior weapons researcher with a strong track record in laser design, thinks it might be possible to alter the dynamics of hurricanes by providing ionized pathways for discharge of electrical charges on one side or the other of hurricanes using vertically launched ion exhaust rocketry or by high intensity laser pulses.

Relevant excerpt here: YouTube.
That's not much detail to go on, but it is a suggestion that's out there.
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Your principla problem is one of scale and buildings and typhoons are not items of similar scales.
Perhaps, but that's why it's a mega-engineering challenge.
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Old 05-24-2020, 11:09 AM   #15
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Default Re: [Cyberpunk Engineering Challenge] #2 Typhoon Abatement Platform

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Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post

That's from here.
e.
Nothing from the people working on the Oak Island mystery or any of the guys looking for ghosts?

The lightning guy is looking to disrupt circulation not absorb "storm energy". That's why his vague idea can use lightning or lasers. He's trying to pump more energy into the storm, just in the wrong places for orderly circulation.
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Old 05-24-2020, 11:11 AM   #16
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Default Re: [Cyberpunk Engineering Challenge] #2 Typhoon Abatement Platform

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Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
The problem is defining "sufficiently large."
A dike that covers the length of your coastline will greatly reduce storm surge and will also be useful against tsunamis, but yes, I am thinking scale in the hundreds of kilometers.
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Old 05-25-2020, 10:25 AM   #17
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Default Re: [Cyberpunk Engineering Challenge] #2 Typhoon Abatement Platform

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
A dike that covers the length of your coastline will greatly reduce storm surge and will also be useful against tsunamis, but yes, I am thinking scale in the hundreds of kilometers.
If it's a 100 metre high sea wall, then we're starting to get cyberpunk. I'm not sure any smaller dike would weaken a storm any more than it's already weakened by crossing land, though it would be useful against storm surges. But then what happens to your beaches and seaside homes? What about all the hundreds of little islands along the coast of somewhere like Japan or the Philippines?
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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Nothing from the people working on the Oak Island mystery or any of the guys looking for ghosts?
It was based on one line from the Wikipedia article, which I gave some offhand speculation about, but since you were so interested I hunted down the original source and that's what it was. Not much I can do about that, but I'm glad you found it amusing.
Quote:
The lightning guy is looking to disrupt circulation not absorb "storm energy". That's why his vague idea can use lightning or lasers. He's trying to pump more energy into the storm, just in the wrong places for orderly circulation.
Ok, so triggering lightning discharges might be a possible way to disrupt a developing storm (even if it's discredited for current technology). That's something useful for the platform's arsenal.
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Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 View Post
The only way I could see this possibly working is if there's some point or stage in the ongoing 'process' of a hurricane that is vulnerable to disruption. What that would be is a good question, but if such a thing were discovered then maybe the tower concept might be workable. The equivalent of stopping a car or truck by disabling the spark plugs.

For believability, whatever it does should probably need time to work, not ending the storm all at once but gradually degrading it over hours and days. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if this thing needed to be inside the eye of the storm to work. That's where the 'engine' is, after all. So using it might involve bringing it through the storm walls into the eye before it can be used. I see adventure possibilities.
The surface cooling strategies and ejecting soot into the upper eye wall (which heats the higher clouds to even out the temperature gradient) would be done from the eye, while the Stormfury strategy works on storm bands outward of the eye. This gives a few different approaches for the platform to have on its experimental schedule.
Quote:
Note too that all that energy is going to go somewhere. A hurricane redistributes energy from the tropics toward the higher latitudes. Disrupt one and the energy has to reappear somewhere. You'll likely affect the weather over a very large region.
This is something I want to come back to later in the thread, but there are some interesting things to think about if we stop cyclones happening.

----

So, the next thing is to look at the megastructure's structure.

2) T-CATCH Structure
To have any significant effect on a typhoon, this thing is going to have to be large. (Okay, an array of smaller ships with OTEC pumps or whatever is probably more realistic and a better way to stretch a budget, but we're thinking big here.)

Let's say it's going to be 4000 metres tall, the same height as the tallest proposed "fully envisioned" building, the X-SEED 4000. The design principles would be quite different, however. The X-SEED 4000 would be fully occupied, using all of its internal space, and sit on solid ground. The T-CATCH has to move and float on the ocean, and most of its structure would be empty space, basically with mostly just the scaffolding for various pieces of storm abatement equipment that are distributed about it, and locations for crew stations, command centres, power, propulsion, docking, landing and other facilities.

2.1) Lofstrom Loops
Making something this tall as a compressive structure, where components sit on top of other load-bearing components, would be stretching the limits of material science, whether we use steel, carbon fibre or something else. (Though I couldn't find a hard upper limit on the height of a compressive structure.) Furthermore, the mass of it would mean it would probably have trouble floating with a shallow-enough draft to actually go anywhere.

So instead, a more interesting idea would be to use Lofstrom loops. These work on the same principle as a fire hose stiffening when it carries a high pressure water stream, but instead of water, the loops would carry a ferromagnetic chain or stream of pellets that are contained in a sheath by electromagnets, circulating at hypervelocity speeds. Have these circular Lofstrom loops arranged in a "flower of life" pattern, with each loop canted at an angle, and when they power up they expand along one axis into ellipses, thus raising a central platform. There are 3 circles in that diagram, but any number from 2 up would be feasible. We could have 3 or 4 concentric stages with this arrangement, each raising the central part to a greater height, with the inner loops set at greater angles.

The advantage of this should be that the whole structure is much lighter, and it depends on the tensile properties of materials rather than their compressive properties, which is supposedly useful in engineering. The structure could be raised or collapsed as needed, and would only need to be powered up while tracking a typhoon. I have a suspicion that the loops would provide some gyroscopic stability for the structure, which would be useful for preventing it falling over in a typhoon. And we also get some dramatic possibilities of combat damaging a hypervelocity pellet sheath, of terrorists threatening to blow them up and spray supersonic bullets everywhere, or of shutting down the loops to collapse the structure.

----

Okay, does that seem reasonable so far?
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Old 05-25-2020, 10:57 AM   #18
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Default Re: [Cyberpunk Engineering Challenge] #2 Typhoon Abatement Platform

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If it's a 100 metre high sea wall, then we're starting to get cyberpunk. ?
He's trying to stop the storm surge rather than weakening the whole storm. It only needs to be higher than the storm surge.

100 meters would only block the wind for maybe even less than 100 meters behind the wall. If you want to block the whole storm you need a strong wall 10,000 meters high.
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Old 05-25-2020, 12:25 PM   #19
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Default Re: [Cyberpunk Engineering Challenge] #2 Typhoon Abatement Platform

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
He's trying to stop the storm surge rather than weakening the whole storm. It only needs to be higher than the storm surge.

100 meters would only block the wind for maybe even less than 100 meters behind the wall. If you want to block the whole storm you need a strong wall 10,000 meters high.
OK, that goes beyond cyberpunk, and into 'Crystal Spires and Togas' territory (far-future megastructures, in other words - still vastly cheaper and easier than building a ringworld, though).
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Old 05-27-2020, 09:03 AM   #20
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Default Re: [Cyberpunk Engineering Challenge] #2 Typhoon Abatement Platform

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He's trying to stop the storm surge rather than weakening the whole storm. It only needs to be higher than the storm surge.
My point was that a seawall that only protects against storm surges wouldn't be that dramatic. It'd have to be much higher before we start getting into cyberpunk aesthetics, such as this from Blade Runner 2049.

Quote:
100 meters would only block the wind for maybe even less than 100 meters behind the wall. If you want to block the whole storm you need a strong wall 10,000 meters high.
Though mountain ranges have effects on cyclones, so I wonder what effect a lower but still massive wall would have.

----

Regarding the Power Extraction strategy above, it seems there is some support for it.

This study (summary here) modelled the effect of an array of wind turbines along the coast in the path of different hurricanes, showing they could be significantly weakened. With between 70,000 and 500,000 turbines with 120m diameter blades, rated for 5.0MW each, there were wind speed decreases of between 25 and 45 m/s (55 to 100mph), and storm surge reductions of up to 75%, and the turbines extracted up to 2.65 TW of power.

These are large arrays spread over a vast area of coastline, as compared to our floating tower. However, they are static and can only interact with the storm as it approaches, whereas ours can stay in the storm for a period of days or weeks. The question is whether the scale of an array is similar to that of the platform. The other advantage of the platform is that arrays have to be installed for every major city (though they can produce electricity normally during normal conditions), whereas the platform can be sent to deal with the cyclone itself.

As for the Lightning Discharge "draining" effect, there's this paper. However, it's based on a personal theory of the author that cyclones are upheld by their internal electric field, and which a sufficient number of lightning discharges can drain. It does have some useful observations though, such as that lightning discharges are followed by increased precipitation, so there's still a possibility that there's a mechanism for weakening cyclones that way.

This paper explains the jet-engine method in more detail, with the cool bonus that it actually involves creating man-made cyclones. The jet engines spray a column of warm surface water into the air, seeding the formation of a mini-cyclone. The theory is similar to back burning for bushfires, cooling off warm water in the path of an oncoming cyclone, but with the warning that you don't want your cyclone combining with the larger natural one otherwise you'll have a lot of trouble.

Finally, this paper gives the best rundown that I came across of different mitigation methods in scientific terms, and adds their own satellite based microwave (cloud heating) and laser (induced condensation and induced cloud seeding) methods that could be adapted for use by the platform.

----

2.2 Structure Questions
At this point, there are two things I'm stuck on regarding the structure itself. How deep would its draft be? This limits the places it can go to significantly, and would be a significant drag on the propulsion system.

Leading to the other question- how is it propelled? I'm thinking it has a circular hull instead of a boat-shaped hull, although I don't know if that matters for something up to 10km across. And it has to be able to maintain a speed of at least 25 kph to keep up with the typhoon's movement.
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