My Super Black Technology Empire

Therefore, space elevators will be built in the future, whether it is from the perspective of saving time and effort, or its huge carrying capacity that can start with the unit of a ton, and the ability to transport a large number of people into space. Fighters are incomparable.

So things like space elevators will be gradually eliminated in the future, but for now, they are indeed a necessity.

As for the main difficulties and solutions of the space elevator, before coming here, the origin has given a set of reasonable solutions.

The first is the ground station. The difficulty in the construction of the ground station lies in the selection of the address, the fixing of the cables and the construction on the sea.

First of all, the ground station should be built on the equator. The climate of the site selection should meet the year-round wind force below level 2, without cumulonimbus and other clouds that can generate thunderstorms, and the principle of various pressure belts and monsoon circulation.

In addition to the climate, the extreme situation of cable breakage must also be considered, so the location of the ground station should be far away from the place where people gather, just like the airport, which is usually built in the suburbs, except for noise and other issues , the most important thing is to avoid damage to residential areas caused by aircraft failures and crashes.

Moreover, the crust in this area should be relatively stable and strong enough to fix the cables and keep them away from earthquakes.

There are a lot of data that believe that the equator located east of the sunshine line and west of the American continent is a more suitable location, and the axial tension provided by the ground station is used to fix and maintain a distance of 36,000 miles or even longer. Heavy cables, and the depth of cable embedding has very high requirements.

At the same time, the ground station also participates in sharing the stress and swing, and the ground station also needs a higher tower structure to keep the cable vertical.

Therefore, in order to meet the above requirements, Datang Technology needs to build a super high tower as an anchor. The overall height of this tower must be at least 480 meters. One part is used to fix the anchor under the sea surface, and the other part is used to deal with the cable Stress and swing, in actual construction, the height above ground and underground can be reasonably allocated according to the situation.

The problem of carrying out construction operations in the sea is actually not very difficult, because the "Nantianmen" project is to carry out construction and assembly on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. For operations under the ocean, intelligent robots are fully capable of this task.

Therefore, by comparing the global hydrological data and geological data, we are planning to select a place with a suitable and relatively stable seabed texture.

At the same time, in order to maintain its own structure, the ground station should have an area of ​​at least 2KM, which can be achieved by reclamation. The larger area can meet the needs of it as an air-ground transportation hub to configure transportation facilities such as seaports, airports, and even roads and bridges, and Set up supporting cities around to meet the various service requirements required by loads or passengers.

Therefore, at present, a piece of seawater with a relatively small depth is needed.

At the same time, the seabed is hard, which can provide enough tension to hold the cable and prevent it from flying out directly.

Another point is the cable problem.

The cable is the most important structure of the space elevator. It needs to have a large radius, extremely high strength and corrosion resistance, as well as shear resistance and fatigue resistance. The difficulty lies in how to bear the stress and how to build.

One of the solutions is the material. At present, someone has selected a high-strength, high-heat-resistant composite fiber as the cable of the space elevator—PBO (poly-p-phenylene benzobisoxazole), also known as diesel. Long fiber.

This is a composite material produced by Amejian for aerospace in the 1980s. However, the breaking length of the Zylon fiber is only 384 kilometers, which is only 1100 of the minimum target length, and the cost is also very high. It is said that if this is adopted, it is not enough to sell Datang Technology.

At present, the material with the most application scenarios is something called carbon nanotubes.

Carbon nanotubes, also known as bucky tubes, are one-dimensional quantum materials with a special structure (the radial dimension is on the order of nanometers, the axial dimension is on the order of microns, and both ends of the tube are basically sealed).

Carbon nanotubes are mainly coaxial tubes with several to tens of layers of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal shape. A fixed distance is maintained between the layers, approx., and the diameter is generally 220nm.

The tensile strength of carbon nanotubes is 118.9±, the fracture strain is ±%, and the toughness is 8.0±. The stretching of the material belongs to nonlinear elastic behavior, which is consistent with the widely reported elasticity of carbon nanotubes.

The cable of a space elevator must withstand a tension of about 60-100gpa (gigapascal), and steel will break when it bears about 2gpa, so carbon nanotubes have become a more suitable material.

Moreover, the lifetime of carbon nanotubes is very high, because the lifetime of carbon nanotubes is almost independent of the frequency of loading, which means that the sample defects are formed instantaneously, and the time required for crack propagation is negligible.

In other words, the fatigue failure process occurs suddenly, there is no progressive damage, and there is no damage accumulation process. The fatigue life of carbon nanotubes mainly depends on the generation time of initial defects.

However, the fatigue behavior of carbon nanotubes has a certain relationship with temperature. Higher temperatures will lead to a decrease in the fatigue resistance of carbon nanotubes, while at low temperatures they show higher toughness.

The earth's atmosphere, on the other hand, will lead to the continuous weakening of the heat preservation effect and the gradual decrease of the temperature as the altitude increases. This characteristic can be said to be perfectly in line with the fatigue behavior of carbon nanotubes.

However, the current carbon nanotubes have not yet been put into use, and the longest carbon nanotubes can only be produced to 50 centimeters, which is far from being able to actually use or even manufacture cables.

So Ye Fan also plans to invest a sum of money to conduct research and development on carbon nanotube-related industries, and then exchange related technologies in the system. It is only a matter of time before the results are produced.

The space elevator plan must be placed after the floating city of the "South Tianmen" project, that is to say, after the completion of the third phase of the project, the relevant life support system will be completed, and the floating city can be directly flown to Space, become one of the largest space stations the world has ever seen.

So at this time, the installation of the space elevator will be launched in space. For example, the synchronous orbit station will be installed first, and then the cable will be hung down, and then the ground station will be installed.

In fact, it can also be known through calculation that when the mass is evenly distributed, the maximum stress is concentrated at the synchronous orbit station. That is to say, if all the cables use the same cross section, the material capacity of the first half will be would be greatly wasted.