h a l f b a k e r yYou gonna finish that?
add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, best, random
news, help, about, links, report a problem
browse anonymously,
or get an account
and write.
register,
|
|
|
The world is filling up with empty drinking water bottles, at an alarming rate, with many of the ending up in the sea.
I say we deliberately put them into the sea, stuffed into the hulls of specially designed ships that are made from two lightweight, rigid hulls that are spaced about two metres apart
and held together with strong spars. Omly the inner one needs to be waterproof. The outer can present a ribbed surface, with the bottles carefully arranged in streamlined rows between retaining strakes.
The bottles, with lids tightly screwed on, create massive buoyancy whilst also removing vast numbers of PET bottles from the environment.
I haven't done the numbers but a ship 500 metres long and 100 metres across the beam would certainly carry an awful lot of bottled water from Fiji to the rest of the world.
Of course, BubbaCo Shipping (Panama) will refuse carriage of such ethically questionable cargo, once we have managed to launch the first of our proposed fleet.
The Plastiki
http://blog.makezin..._the_pacific_o.html
A very brief description of a project to make a boat using drinking bottles for buoyancy. [kaz, Oct 15 2009]
The SS "Junkraft"
http://www.junkraft.com/home.html
[knowtion, Oct 15 2009]
[link]
|
| |
So, you're using discarded plastic bottles to fill in the space between the two hulls of a double-hulled tanker or bulk carrier? ... to improve the buoyancy of that tanker in case the outer hull is breached, or for some other reason? |
|
| |
To improve buoyancy; to make the ship less prone to sinking, as it contains millions of small, watertight compartments... and to recycle millions of empty plastic bottles at practically no reprocessing cost. |
|
| |
That's all. just an altruistic, sensible reuse of resources. |
|
| |
How does it improve buoyancy when they're encased in waterproof hulls anyway? |
|
| |
you're forgetting the lids bubba. |
|
| |
I am? I thought that was covered in the third paragraph. Less coffee, [WcW]. That might improve your reading comprehension? |
|
| |
You could use the same idea in a tug and barge scenario with the barge being a net buoyed by recycled bottles [+]. However, on larger vessels the water bottles may collapse due to water pressure. |
|
| |
I can't find anything more detailed than my link, possibly because I originally read about it in an actual magazine, but the bottles for buoynacy thing has kind of already been done. |
|
| |
bubba, most used water bottles lack their lids. They aren't just clinging to them waiting for you to put them back on, they're gone. |
|
| |
I guess my question is, are supertankers somehow lacking in
bouyancy? How will they benefit from this? The outer, ribbed
surface you mentioned, along with the bottles themselves, will
create drag and slow the ship down, no?. Many of the bottles
will also burst under pressure during the first hard rocking the
ship encounters, resulting in plastic pieces, and the wrappers,
littering the ocean again. To remove all the wrappers would take
a lot of time and manpower. As has been mentioned already,
another issue is the caps. You'd have to somehow separate the
ones with caps from the bottles without, then provide and attach
caps for all the ones without. |
|
| |
Ribs on swimsuits make them go faster in the water. Seems counterintuitive, but it's true. |
|
| |
Easy to heatseal the neck of each bottle, to compensate for missing lids. |
|
| |
Tankers go down to about 20-30 meters. The bottles would be crushed by the 2-3 bar overpressure. The old 'Raise the Titanic!' trick with the ping pong balls is better due to the pressure resistance of spheres. |
|
| |
//Ribs on swimsuits make them go faster in the water. Seems counterintuitive, but it's true.// That is only true for a very small sample of ribs, most will increase the drag. Extrapolating from mm-sized ribs on swimsuits to ribs-from-bottles on tankers while staying with the same fluid medium yet switching speeds also seems to be stretching the analogy a bit. |
|
| |
Actually, even ping pong balls collapse any deeper than a few
dozen meters. |
|
| |
I saw an article recently, that seemed to indicate there were thousands of golf balls hovering at a certain depth in Loch Ness. It seems improbable. |
|
| |
Even better if they were golf ball versions of the same idea.+ |
|
| |