Zero Gravity Engineering & Science

[arkain101]

This topic is to add, read, and share information and concepts on the uses of zero gravity manufacturing.

 

 

Explanation and advantages of Micro-gravity Manufacturing

 

Production of zero-gravity materials melting, mixing and solidifying mixtures of different weights in orbit without the interference of gravity holds tremendous potential. An example easy to visualize is mixing marbles of different weights in an aquarium of water, then freezing it.

 

On Earth the glass and metal marbles would sink to the bottom, some of the plastic ones might sink, float or end up somewhere in between, and the Styrofoam marbles would certainly end up floating on the top. In orbit all the marbles would stay mixed somewhere in the water.

 

In fact you could actually place them wherever you wanted them. The metal ones might be near the surface, the Styrofoam ones near the bottom or they could both end up side by side in the center of the tank.

 

If you froze the zero-gravity mixture into ice, brought it down to Earth (un-melted) and asked someone to duplicate it within an hour, they couldn't. Technically they could freeze a thin layer of ice at the bottom, place your "bottom" marbles down there, then freeze another thin layer, then position other marbles and so on, but it would take a very long time. Making a roomful of this material with millions of marbles would be impossible.)

 

The same thing happens when you melt and mix molecules of a heavy element like lead with a lighter one like titanium. There are literally millions of these "impossible", evenly mixed combinations which could be produced in the absence of gravity, some having dozens of components in different ratios.

 

Some of these mixtures - called alloys - will have properties of no commercial value, but researchers believe others will give us extremely powerful, 50-pound batteries able to drive electric cars a thousand miles between charges (they'd only need a pound or 2 of zero-gravity material, just as a 10-pound computer has only a few ounces of chips), strands of fabric able to make clothes stay the same temperature whether the surrounding air was 40 degrees below zero or 140 degrees above, computer chips a million times faster than today's, and thousands of other products only America could duplicate.

 

Zero-gravity crystals are another material with tremendous potential. Crystals on Earth form sort of the way you would form - or build - a house of cards if you had a thin layer of glue on each card's edge and if you imagined that gravity was both a breeze and was causing the table to vibrate slightly. It's pretty easy to see why, without gravity, you could build houses - or crystals of unlimited size.

 

But in orbit you could also use cards - or crystal elements - of different sizes or materials. Some cards could be transparent or translucent, while some could be thicker, thinner, larger or even of a different shape. The same holds true with different crystal elements. These zero-gravity crystals could be of tremendous use in our computer, auto and aviation industries, and dozens of others having nothing to do with space as it's used today.

[arkain101]

Space Island Group - Manufacturing

 

 

Metal Alloy Manufacturing

Alloys are produced by melting and mixing different substances into new combinations, then cooling and solidifying the resulting blend. Tests performed on several shuttle missions have proven that in the absence of gravity, uniquely strong metal alloys can be formed. Preliminary estimates made of this market indicate that it could generate revenues between $10 billion and $15 billion per year.

 

Semiconductor Manufacturing

The current generation of semi-conductors is approaching a ceiling in speed and power. Experiments done on recent shuttle flights indicate that Micro Gravity semiconductor materials could produce chips as much as a thousand times more powerful than anything now available. The projected market for these new semiconductors could approach $35 to $40 billion annually as lessors of our Space Island facilities reach full production.

[arkain101]

Water boiling in zero-g

 

 

September 7, 2001: The next time you're watching a pot of water boil, perhaps for coffee or a cup of soup, pause for a moment and consider: what would this look like in space? Would the turbulent bubbles rise or fall? And how big would they be? Would the liquid stay in the pan at all?

 

Until a few years ago, nobody knew. Indeed, physicists have trouble understanding the complex behavior of boiling fluids here on Earth. Perhaps boiling in space would prove even more baffling.... It's an important question because boiling happens not only in coffee pots, but also in power plants and spacecraft cooling systems. Engineers need to know how boiling works.