New form of mechanical advantage: Off season research potential

[Ryan_Todd]

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

If you coupled this with a ratchet, you could probably use this...during the winter to lift heavy loads a relatively short distance.

Candidate application #1:

Antarctica is not a particularly friendly place for man-made structures. Every time a snow storm or blizzard blows through (a single storm can last for weeks at a time), a new layer of snow and ice is deposited on the surface; this causes the rest of the ice underneath to slowly compress and sink, flowing (as any glacier does) downhill towards the ocean.

The obvious difficulties of drilling a foundation all the way to bedrock are therefore trivial by comparison to the immense shear forces that the slowly flowing glacier would impart on any support columns that we could possibly build. Simply put, there is just no way for a research station deep in the heart of the continent to be founded on anything but the glacial ice itself!

This conclusion leaves us with a new problem, however. In addition to the buildup of ice and snow constantly raising the surface of the glacier relative to the foundation we built, we also observe that any research station we can build will slowly melt the ice beneath its foundation by exerting significant pressure and conducting heat from the occupant quarters. We can minimize all three effects with careful engineering (for example, a station in the shape of an airfoil can accelerate the air moving over/under it, thereby discouraging the buildup of snow), but the fact remains that unless we do something about it, our research station will inevitably sink into the ice and become buried as time goes on.

How do we solve this problem, then?

Simple!

Every time we feel that our building has sunk too deep into the ice, we lift the entire thing.*

This is currently implemented in a variety of ways at different facilities, but there's no reason why we couldn't just use the outside temperature to do the work for us. A ratcheting piston could easily be designed that requires nothing more than a source of liquid water to function; since the production of heat is already the primary purpose of an Antarctic station's generators, this would be similarly straightforward to implement in practice. The process might go something like this:

1. The valves on all the lift pistons are opened.
2. Each piston is already full of ice from the last time the station was raised, so this ice is either removed altogether or melted with electric heating elements (pistons must be designed to accommodate the chosen method).
3. Each piston is topped off with liquid water (about 4 degrees Celsius would be ideal).
4. All piston valves are closed back up.
5. Let the Antarctic temperatures do their thing; the ice will proceed to freeze and expand, lifting the entire research station above it.
6. ...?
7. PROFIT!

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*For more information about the challenges of South Pole architecture, check this out:
https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_rep...tation_new.jsp

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