Revolutionizing Bridge Design: A Vision of the Future

Zero-weight bridges

Imagine a world where bridges defy traditional engineering constraints, floating effortlessly above waterways without the need for supports or suspension cables. This is not a scene from a science fiction novel; it’s the vision of a groundbreaking bridge design that could change the face of civil engineering and architecture.

The Genesis of an Idea

A decade ago last week, I invented a novel material I called “carbon foam”. Made of graphene spheres with vacuum interiors, it boasts a density similar to helium, its high buoyancy at ground level making it possible to make virtually weightless structures. With very many possible applications, from floating Avatar-like islands in the sky to my Sky Lines hypersonic air travel and tethered floating architecture, this material laid the foundation for a new era in construction, where the impossible becomes possible.

Adapting the Vision

The idea soon evolved, allowing for non-spherical containment and variable density. By simply pumping air in or out of a sealed structure, still made of graphene with intricate, flowing internal structure, the sort we’re rapidly becoming accustomed to AI designing, the material’s weight can be adjusted, paving the way for structures that are both light and adaptable.

A Bridge Like No Other

Enter the bridge concept: a single-span structure, free from the constraints of weight. This design eliminates the need for support columns, allowing for construction from one end to the other, as long as desired. Picture the San Francisco Bay, graced by a new single span bridge, a single gentle arc sitting elegantly alongside its historic counterpart, but without any suspension or columns.

Furthermore, it can be constructed from one end, all the way across, the entire arc only connected at one end until the final days when it is joined to the highway at the other end.

Tackling the Wind

A key challenge for such a structure is wind. Traditional bridges use heavy materials and suspension cables to counteract wind forces, but this innovative design demands a different approach. Enter adaptive aerodynamics, powered by AI. Structures such as spirals and aerofoils, dynamically adjusted by AI algorithms, would balance and greatly reduce the wind load, ensuring stability and safety.

The Warren Truss: An Old Friend Revisited

The Warren Truss, a design known for its stability and strength, finds new life in this concept. In a weightless world, its potential is fully realized, offering unparalleled structural integrity without the burden of heaviness.

But we have AI now, so we can start with the Warren Truss as inspiration and use AI to simulate far more elegant, aesthetic and curvy mesh solutions to the various forces. Then, having used adaptive AI aerodynamics to reduce wind forces, the new meshes could produce bridges that are very beautiful and minimalist.

This is not just about creating a functional bridge; it’s about crafting a piece of art. AI simulations enable the design of aesthetically pleasing structures that are both simple and beautiful. The bridge’s design, while serving its primary function, would also stand as a testament to the harmonious blend of technology and art.

I tried to get a pretty AI illustration of a new San Francisco Bridge, but since AI draws its inspirations mostly from existing imagery, every attempt it made still had support columns or suspension structures.

Here is one of the better ones. After several more attempts very, very clearly explaining the requirements, I lost patience:

A Visionary Future

This bridge would be more than a pathway over water; it would blend our past and future where traditional design principles meet cutting-edge technology. It’s a promise of what can be achieved when we dare to reimagine the foundations of our world.

Reducing infection rates – common sense

We could greatly reduce suffering, deaths, economic damage and duration of lockdown if the authorities were to apply some basic principles.

Restrict travel between high and low infection areas

Some areas are much more highly infected than others. Travel from highly infected areas to much less infected areas should be severely restricted. The gain from doing so is far higher than by restricting other travel.

Restricting travel within high infection areas will also achieve greater gains than doing so in low infection areas.

Red and green trains

Instead of all trains being made available to everyone, red trains would carry groups more likely to be infected and would be used by people who either live or work in a high-infection area. Green trains would be used by those who both live and work in low infection areas. There doesn’t need to be a very high difference before statistical gains are achieved. Any station would receive a few red trains, then a few green ones.

A further derivative would be to have red and green supermarket hours to separate those who work exposed to high risk from those who aren’t.

Both of the above rely on separating groups that have very different infection rates and both are quite robust against moderate cross-infection.

Travel profiles indicate most effective use of limited testing

We already target health workers and carers, but what about the rest of the population?

The faster we can identify infected people and isolate them, the more we can reduce the rate of spread, the number of total infections, overall suffering, and deaths. Given very limited testing capacity, we must optimise our approach. Some simple reasoning applies.

First, there is little point in testing those in lockdown. It would be nice in an ideal situation but we aren’t in one. The few who become infected will still emerge if they become ill enough.

The rest fall in two categories. One group travels mostly alone in private vehicles. A few will come into contact with large numbers of people through their work. If we can identify those high-contact groups, they can be allocated a higher priority.

Those travelling most on public transport are much more likely to become infected, coming into more frequent contact with infected strangers and once they become infected, are likely to infect many more. Concentrating testing on them will achieve the greatest efficiency at finding (and removing) infected people from the mix. The more infected people that can be found and removed from public transport, the faster the virus will be controlled. We know who uses public transport most via their payment cards. We  also know that those using red trains will have higher incidence than those on green trains.

Simple logic therefore shows that limited testing should therefore be applied in the following priority:

1. Front line carers
2. Most frequent travellers on red-train public transport
3. Less frequent travellers on red-train public transport
4. Most frequent travellers on green-train public transport
5. Less frequent travellers on green-train public transport
6. Those living in red areas who travel mostly using private transport
7. Those living in  green areas who travel mostly using private transport
8. Those in lockdown who must still venture out sometimes
9. Those in total isolation

This isn’t 100% optimised, but it is close enough.

High speed transatlantic submarine train

In 1863, Jules Verne wrote about the idea of suspended transatlantic tunnels through which trains could be sent using air pressure. Pneumatic tube delivery was a fashionable idea then, and small scale pneumatic delivery systems were commonplace until the late 20th century – I remember a few shops using them to transport change around. In 1935, the film ‘The tunnel’ featured another high speed transatlantic tunnel, as did another film in 1972, ‘Tunnel through the deeps’. Futurists have often discussed high speed mass transit systems, often featuring maglev and vacuums (no, Elon Musk didn’t invent the idea, his Hyperloop is justifiably famous for resurfacing and developing this very old idea and is likely to see its final implementation).

Anyway, I have read quite a bit about supercavitation over the last years. First developed in 1960 as a military idea to send torpedoes at high speed, it was successfully implemented in 1972 and has since developed somewhat. Cavitation happens when a surface, such as a propeller blade, moves through water so fast that a cavity is left until the water has a chance to close back in. As it does, the resultant shock wave can damage the propeller surface and cause wear. In supercavitation, the cavity is deliberate, and the system designed so that the cavity encloses the entire projectile. In 2005, the first proposal for people transport emerged, DARPA’s Underwater Express Program, designed to transport small groups of Navy personnel at speeds of up to 100 knots. Around that time, a German supercavitating torpedo was reaching 250mph speeds.

More promising articles suggest that supersonic speeds are achievable under water, with less friction than going via air. Achieving the initial high speed and maintaining currently requires sophisticated propulsion mechanisms, but not for much longer. I believe the propulsion problem can be engineered away by pulling capsules with a strong tether. That would be utterly useless for a torpedo of course, but for a transport system would be absolutely fine.

Transatlantic traffic is quite high, and if a cheaper and more environmentally friendly system than air travel were available, it would undoubtedly increase. My idea is to use a long string of capsules attached to a long graphene cable, pulled in a continuous loop at very high speed. Capsules would be filled at stations, accelerated to speed and attached to the cable for their transaltlantic journey, then detached, decelerated and their passengers or freight unloaded. Graphene cable would be 200 times stronger than steel so making such a cable is feasible.

The big benefit of such a system is that no evacuated tube is needed. The cable and capsules would travel through the water directly. Avoiding the need for an expensive and complex  tube containing a vacuum, electromagnetic propulsion system and power supply would greatly reduce cost. All of the pulling force for a cable based system would be applied at the ends.

Graphene cable doesn’t yet exist, but it will one day. I doubt if current supercavitation research is up to the job either, but that’s quite normal for any novel engineering project. Engineers face new problems and solve them every day. By the time the cable is feasible, we will doubtless be more knowledgeable about supercavitation too. So while it’s a bit early to say it will definitely become reality, it is certainly not too early to start thinking about it. Some future Musk might well be able to pull it off.

Future air travel

Now and then I get asked about future air travel, sometimes about planes, sometimes about the travel and tourism industry, sometimes climate change or luxury. There is already lots in the media about the future of the industry, such as NASA’s supersonic aircraft, e.g. https://t.co/PWpd2yVN0y or the latest business class space design concepts to cram in even more luxury, e.g. http://www.airlinereporter.com/2016/03/business-class-reimagined-etihad-airways-a380-business-studio-review/ so I won’t waste time repeating stuff you can find on Google. Here are some things I haven’t seen yet instead:

Aircraft skin design – video panels

Aircraft skins are generally painted in carrier colors and logos, but a new development in luxury yachts might hint at aircraft skins that behave as video screens instead. The designs in

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3475039/Moonstone-superyacht-LED-triangles-light-display.html

are meant to mimic reflections of the sea, since it is a yacht skin, but obviously higher resolution polymer displays on an aircraft could display anything at all. It is surprising give aircraft prices that this hasn’t already been done, at least for large panels. One possible reason is that the outer skin heats up a lot during flight. That might bar some types of panel being used, but some LEDs can function perfectly well at the sort of temperatures expected for civil aircraft.

Integration with self-driving cars – terminal-free flying

A decade or more ago, I suggested integrating self driving cars systems into rail, so that a long chain of self driving cars could form a train. Obviously Euro-tunnel already has actual trains carry cars, but what I meant was that the cars can tether to each other electronically and drive themselves, behaving as a train as a half way evolution point to fully replacing trains later with self driving pod systems. As each car reaches its local station, it would peel off and carry on the roads to the final destination. The other pods would close together to fill the gap, or expand gaps to allow other pods to join from that station. Previous blogs have detailed how such systems can be powered for city or countrywide use.

Stage 1

Such end-to-end self driving could work all the way to the aircraft too. To avoid crime and terrorism abuses, self-driving cars owned by large fleet management companies – which will be almost all of them in due course – will have to impose security checks on passengers. Think about it. If that were not so, any terrorist would be able to order a car with an app on an anonymous phone, fill it full of explosives, tell it where to go, and then watch as it does the suicide bombing run all by itself. Or a drug gang could use them for deliveries. If security is already imposed with proper identity checks, then it would be easy to arrange a safe area in the airport for a simple security check for explosives, guns etc, before the car resumes its trip all the way to an aircraft departure gate. System restrictions could prevent passengers leaving the car during the airport part of the journey except at authorized locations. The rest of the terminal would be superfluous.

Stage 2

Then it starts to get interesting. My guess is that the optimal design for these self-driving pods would be uniform sized cuboids. Then, congestion and air resistance can be minimized and passenger comfort optimized. It would then be possible to link lots of these pods together with their passengers and luggage still in them, and drive the whole lot into a large aircraft. They could be stacked in layers of course too (my own design of pods doesn’t even use wheels) to maximize cabin use. Aisles could be made to allow passengers out to visit loos or exercise.

Many people of my age will think of Thunderbird 2 at this point. And why not? Not such a bad idea. A huge box acting as a departure gate for dozens of small pods, ready for the aircraft to land, drop off its existing pod, refuel, pick up the new box of pods, and take off again. Even the refuel could be box-implemented, part of the box structure or a pod.

Stage 3

Naturally, airlines might decide that they know best how to provide best comfort to their passengers. So they might design their own fleets of special pods to pick up passengers from their homes and bring them all the way onto the aircraft, then all the way to final destination at the other end. That gives them a huge opportunity for adding luxury and branding or other market differentiation. Their fleets would mix on the roads with fleets from other companies.

Stage 4

However, it is hard to think of any other sector that is as adept by necessity at making the very most of the smallest spaces as airlines. Having started to use these advantages for self driving pods for their own air passengers, many of those passengers would be very happy to also buy the use of those same pods even when they are not flying anywhere, others would learn too, and very soon airlines could become a major fleet manager company for self-driving cars.

Balloon trips and cruises

Large balloons and airships are coming back into business. e.g. http://news.sky.com/story/1654409/worlds-largest-aircraft-set-for-uk-test-flight

Solid balloons will be likely too. I suggested using carbon foam in my sci-fi book Space Anchor, and my superheroes travel around at high speed in their huge carbon balloon, the Carballoon, rescuing people from burning buildings or other disasters, or dumping foam to capture escaping criminals. Since then, Google have also been playing with making lighter than air foams and presumably they will use them for Project Loon.

Lighter than air cities have been explored in the computer game Bioshock Infinite, floating islands in the films Avatar and Buck Rogers. There is certainly no shortage of imagination when it comes to making fun destinations floating in the air. So I think that once the materials become cheap enough, we will start to see this balloon industry really evolve into a major tourism sector where people spend days or weeks in the air. Even conventional balloon experiences such as safaris would be better if the burners and their noise scaring the animals are not needed. A solid balloon could manage fine with just a quiet fan.

Whatever the type of floating destination, or duration of short trip or cruise, of course you need to get to them, so that presents an obvious opportunity for the airline industry, but designing them, providing services, holiday packages, bookings and logistics are also territories where the airline industry might be in pole position, especially since space might still be at a premium.

Air fuel

Although there have already been various demonstrations of hydrogen planes and solar powered planes, I really do not think these are likely to become mainstream. One of the main objections to using conventional fuel is the CO2 emissions, but my readers will know I don’t believe we face a short term threat from CO2-induced climate change and in the mid term, ground use of fossil fuels will gradually decline or move towards shale gas, which produces far less CO2. With all the CO2 savings from ground use decline, there will be far less pressure on airlines to also reduce. Since it is too hard to economically deliver suitable energy density for aircraft use, it will be recognized as a special case that the overall CO2 budgets can easily sustain. The future airline industry will use air fuel not unlike today’s. Let’s consider the alternatives.

Solar is fine for the gossamer-light high altitude aircraft for surveillance of communications, but little use for passenger flight. Covering a plane upper with panels will simply not yield enough power. Large batteries could store enough energy for very short flights, but again not much use since planes can’t compete in short trips. Energy density isn’t good enough. Fuel cells are still the technology of the future and are unlikely to be suited to planes. It is easier to simply use the fuel direct to create thrust. Another red herring is hydrogen. Yes it can be done, but there is little advantage and lots of disadvantages. The output is water vapor, which sounds safe, but is actually a stronger greenhouse effect than CO2 and since aircraft fly high, it will stay in the atmosphere doing its warming far longer (for trans-polar flights it may even become stratospheric water vapor). So hydrogen is no panacea.

So, no change here then.

Threats

There have already been many instances of near collisions with drones. Many drones are very small, but some can carry significant payloads. If a drone carries a lump of solid metal, or an explosive device, it could easily do enough harm to a fast-flying aircraft to cause a crash. That makes drones a strong terrorist threat to aircraft. Even without the intent to harm, any village idiot could fly a drone near to a plane to get pictures and still cause problems.

Another threat that is becoming serious is lasers. Shone from the ground, a high powered hand-held laser could blind a pilot.

http://www.wickedlasers.com/arctic shows the sort of thing you can already buy. $400 buys you 3.5W of blue light. Really cool stuff in the right hands, and the sort of gadget I’d love to own if I could trust myself to be responsible with it, (I did look straight into a laser beam at university, as you do when you’re a student) but not the sort of thing you want used deliberately against pilots.

These two threats are already very apparent, but put them together, and you have a modest drone bought anonymously fitted with a high powered laser (I don’t know whether identity checks are needed for the laser purchase, but I suspect plenty enough are already in circulation). A simple camera linked to a basic pattern recognition system would easily allow the drone to move to an optimal location and then target the laser into the aircraft cockpit and likely into the pilots’ eyes. This is not something that should be possible to build without lots of strict identity checks, but especially for the drones bit, the law is years behind where it ought to be. Lasers of this power also need to be classed as lethal weapons.

New business models

The latest startup fashions suggest someone will soon build a crowd-flying company. A bunch of people in one area wanting to fly to another zone could link electronically via such a company app, and hire a plane/self-driving pods/departure gate/pilot/crew and fly with very little inter-mediation. The main barrier is the strong regulation in the airline industry which is there for all sorts of good reasons, but that is not an impenetrable barrier, just a large one.