Chapter 216 Shield Machine
On the design drawing, the original circular town layout of concentric circles has been modified into a spiral shape.
The entire town is like an ever-extending spring. All buildings are arranged around spiral streets, and in the center of the spiral streets is a geothermal tower.
“Interesting, spiraling downward and extending infinitely?” Purficott looked at the modified structure with an interested look.
It is interesting to design streets that extend in a spiral shape, because they can continue to extend downwards when necessary.
Unlike a flat ring, if you want to extend and expand, you must take out a new ring under the original ring.
The spiral street structure makes expansion easy. You only need to continue digging down at the end, which is very convenient for structural extension.
And another advantage of the spiral structure is that it can also expand on a plane.
Just like a spring extending on a plane, it can also be continuously expanded. The structure is much more convenient than a circular structure.
“With this structure, there is no need to build a large scale at the beginning. Later, it will be much more convenient for the town to expand. It only needs to continue to extend the streets, and even if you want to expand the third The same goes for the second floor, just dig a spiral street." Purficott quickly understood the benefits of this structure and praised it.
Herein lies the advantage of the spiral structure. As long as the geothermal tower located in the center is solved, the extension and expansion of the spiral structure can be left to the residents of the town to solve on their own.
This can indeed greatly reduce the initial investment in urban construction and save time and resources for shelter construction.
“It seems that the only thing that needs to be solved is the geothermal tower.” Purficott continued to fiddle with the drawing, and then enlarged the part of the geothermal tower on the drawing.
The geothermal tower originally designed by Purficott is actually a circulating water pump. It is driven by steam to continuously pump hot water from the ground up, and at the same time, it also injects the cooled cold water into the ground to achieve circulation, which has a great impact on geothermal energy. The utilization rate cannot be said to be very high, but it can barely meet the usage needs.
After all, Perfect Court does not use the open heating in the original world game. The utilization efficiency of heat energy is much higher. As long as the underground geothermal resources can keep up, heating in a closed environment It's enough.
However, Purficott also considered that as the town expands, a single geothermal tower may not be able to bear the heating demand after the town expands.
And there is another very critical point to consider, that is, the ambient temperature is constantly dropping.
According to predictions, the earth's core will be frozen in the next three hundred years, which means that even geothermal resources will be exhausted quickly in the future.
After all, even the core of the earth is frozen, and it is impossible to pump hot water from the ground.
Fortunately, this issue does not need to be considered in the short term. What Purficott needs to pay most attention to now is how to build the shelter. Even the heating can be moved back slightly.
As long as the temperature is not extremely low, the underground shelter itself can enjoy the thermal insulation effect brought by the ground.
This is just like the temperature in the cellar itself is warmer than outside in winter. It is the insulation effect of the ground layer that is used. According to Purficott's calculations and previous tests at the Eagle Beak Cliff base, as long as the shelter is built to a depth of more than three meters, the indoor temperature can basically be guaranteed to remain at zero.
Of course, this is an ideal state, and specific temperature changes need to be determined based on the actual conditions in different regions.
Just like there is a geothermal zone underground in the Eagle Beak area, and the ground temperature is higher than that in the fjord area, then when building the same underground shelter in the fjord area, it needs to be built deeper or added. Heating equipment to compensate for this temperature difference.
But generally speaking, for every one meter you dig down, the ground temperature will rise by 0.03°C. In the absence of the influence of geothermal resources, usually 20 meters underground will enter a constant-temperature formation, that is, the ground temperature will not be affected by the surface ambient temperature. .
The ground temperature in the thermostatic layer is usually around 10-20°C depending on the latitude. In the north, because it is close to the North Pole, the temperature basically hovers around 10°C.
So if you want to be more secure and safe, you only need to start building the shelter at a depth of twenty meters, and at the same time do a good job of insulation and ventilation, which can basically ensure that the temperature is maintained at a temperature that is not very cold. .
If it were the original world before traveling, it would not be very difficult to construct at this depth, and various construction machinery would be enough to ensure the smooth progress of the construction.
But for the world that Purficott is now in, if she wants to construct at this depth without her intervention... It's not that it's impossible, but the entire construction progress will be very slow, and Difficulties abound.
"In this case, maybe I should design a shield machine that can spiral downward?" Purficott looked at the spiral structure of the shelter on the drawing, and such an idea suddenly came to his mind.
Just do it when you think of it. Purficott quickly pulled over a blank drawing and then sketched the ideas in his mind on the drawing.
The shield machine was hailed as the crown jewel of industry in the world before she traveled, but in fact it was not a very new thing. It had been invented in the original world at the end of the 18th century. Excavation of underground tunnels.
It’s just that the shield machine structure at that time was quite primitive, and there was a big gap compared with later shield machines.
In Purficott's view, the structure of the shield machine is actually not complicated. The most critical part is the front-end excavation device. For a master of both alchemy and engineering, It's not a problem.
Combining the modern shield machine structures he had seen in the original world, Purficott easily designed a prototype of a shield machine that could spiral downward.
However, this design is only a first draft, not even a prototype.
Because it only has a closed tunneling shield and a tunneling head driven by a steam engine, and has no other structure.
Although with these two functions, the shield machine can basically be used, it can only be used for digging soil. In case of problems such as underground water seepage or gas leakage, such a simple machine There is no solution for the TBM.
And a particularly important point is that the shield machine is called a shield machine because it does not only have the function of tunneling. It also needs to complete the construction of the pipe wall during the tunneling process.
These need to be continuously improved and improved by Perficott in subsequent designs.
(End of this chapter)