Something fishy is going on in tensegrity structures--fishy as in fish tanks, or to be more precise, underwater fish cages. Robert E. Skelton and SINTEF are joining forces to further the development of this approach to underwater confinement. SINTEF runs the Ocean Space Center, image at right.
All this fishiness started with Wroldsen's patent for a "Marine Structure For A Fish Cage For Aquaculture With A Net Spanned By A Tensegrity Structure". To quote the introduction,
The present invention relates to design concepts for flexible marine aquaculture structures. An extraordinary freedom to control shape, motion and vibration can be achieved by designing the system as a so-called tensegrity structure and by introducing appropriate actuation, sensing and control. A tensegrity structure comprises compressive elements like rods, and tensile elements like lines or wires. The invention also comprises interconnected units of flexible offshore structures.
The invention includes a series of actuated ring structures, based on octahedral cells like those Passera & Pedretti deployed for the Blur Building, Swiss Expo, 2001, and local energy production by means of motion actuated generators.
The whole idea of tensegrity cages is in the news again, as Skelton is advising Trondheim scientists on tensegrity structures, as part of NTNU and SINTEF’s marine research groups. They are focusing on marine tensegrity deployments as part of the IntelliSTRUCT project which is being financed by the Research Council of Norway. The aim is to lay the foundations for a new generation of sea-cages, trawls, vessel hulls and platforms. The researchers envision slender, intelligent structures that adapt to wave loads instead of fighting them. The SINTEF site wrote,
One of the aims of the Trondheim scientists is to develop 'smart' sea-cages for fish farming. They are already thinking of the challenges that await the aquaculture industry when it has to venture into the open sea in order to find enough room to expand. Sea-cages for use at sea will need to be able to withstand all sorts of weather. Traditionally, designers have enabled marine structures to withstand loads by making them strong. Smart structures represent a different philosophy of design, one that prefers adaptation and cooperation to raw strength. If necessary, a smart aquaculture sea-cage will change its own shape, so that it reduces the cross-sectional area that it presents to the waves. If there is little current and thus relatively little oxygen available to the fish, it will increase the area turned towards the direction of the waves.
Tensegrity researchers are also reminded of tensegrity cages deployed on land. See Alexy's tensegrity zoo cages, for example, as http://tensegrity.wikispaces.com/Alexy,+Christian or http://tensegrity.wikispaces.com/Animals
Links:
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق