Inflatable structures
Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2012 10:01 pm
"Paris has enough bridges"
http://www.zundelcristea.com/projects/? ... ml?lang=en
This thing is inflatable. It's a series of joined trampolines, all kept taught by the air pressure.
It's just flexible plastic and rope, i don't see anything hard in there at all. Which means it's portable and deployable. ie: Just set it up for a fair day if you want.
Ships can still go under it.
The lawyer in me says it has potential for tons of injuries, mostly from bouncing into other people, but also from bouncing off onto the solid riverside, into the water (drowning hazard), or even off into a boat.
(anyone else have a concussion as a kid from a bouncy castle? oh, so just me and my equally concussed head-scramble-buddy? oh.)
Well anyway, been ponderin' inflatable structures for years now. Wondered if anyone else was too. They have so many bossipossibilities.
Compliant artificial muscles, always interesting stuff from Festo and Otherlab. Their light weight portability, quick safe deployability, and ability to just fold up again afterwards, very interesting.
They have the potential to be a sort of push-button structures, couple it with a bit of origami knowhow and you can deploy all sorts of complex stuff
. Just literally drop it from a plane, it can cushion it's own impact, or even include it's own inflated parachute. Hell, the thing could even use the fall to inflate the whole structure like traditional parachutes do, and by the time it plonks down it's full-size and ready to.... do whatever buildings do (protect you from paintballs?)[youtube]abFpTmkxlxU[/youtube] [youtube]4KPSe67iwR0[/youtube]
Got some ideas for beach/pool toys that - when left out in the sun - will slowly operate their own internal bellows to keep themselves at peak inflation. The whole mechanism made outof the toy's same foldable rubber/plastic material, no electronics nor solar panels.
It could also make a completely pneumatic solar tracker/heliostat that uses targeted shade on itself to selectively heat/cool inflatable pistons to position itself at the perfect angle, the only power it uses is solar thermal. So you'd have solar panels, surrounded by what are effectively beach toys, you could throw these things outof planes and they would bounce-down safely, orientate themselves towards the sun, and start collecting solar electricity (i guess for a battery, to power some other ad-hoc communications device, or to beam elsewhere?).
Could be an interesting quick-deployable large tethered solar array to power your electric car while you're camping. Press a button, a few dozen of these things fall off your roof-rack harmlessly like folded up tents, roll around a bit bouncing off eachother and inflate, then orientate towards the sun and start to charge your car with several kilowatts while you chill. When deployed they take up a lot of space, which is kinda the point, a lot of solar power needs a lot of space). When you wanna move out again they deflate, are tugged back to the car by their umbilical power-lines and get shoved (maybe automatically, that'd be nice) into the roofrack again.
It becomes even more alarming if you consider putting mylar mirrors on them instead of solar panels.
You could do this on the cheap:
(actually this is what initially gave me the idea years back, the "solarsphere" guys want to use cheap inflatable mirrors to heat molten salt)
Push-button cheap deployable death beam array, transportable in your car!
Damn where's Rijruna, he might like a dangerously powerful portable solar furnace to do some smelting and smithing on the road (just hope he doesn't accidentally melt the car).
i'll work all this solar-thermal pneumatic stuff out one day.
Strandbeests move over.
