Sunday, July 15, 2012

Tensegrity!

Or, when is an artist a mathematician? If one answer is, "When he crosses paths with R. Buckminster Fuller," you're on the right track!

Today's subject, Kenneth Snelson, a fellow who has proposed -- and built -- new physical-conceptual models of the atom and appears to be the very first man to set up a tensegrity tower, an impossible-looking object that stands tall -- on its own bootstraps. Or tension cables. Have a look!

(I could swear at one time I read the University of Hawaii had an AM radio tower built on this model, but I'm not finding it. Once windload is taken into account, such a structure uses up most of its strength holding up its own weight -- that's the design "trick" to it -- but that's all a tower has to do for an AM station: it's really just a fat piece of wire.)

9 comments:

  1. That would be hard to climb.

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  2. I just ran into that term in book two of Hard Magic.

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  3. 60 feet? Isn't that about a quarter wave on 75 meters? I wonder if I can get the parts for that at Home Depot.

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  4. Alan: Depends.

    Ian: Larry does his homework!

    Dave: Yes, I believe you can.

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  5. Also, my kid has one of these - http://www.amazon.com/Manhattan-Toy-200980-Skwish-Classic/dp/B000GI0S4E - which would appear to be an example of a Tensegrity Icosahedron...

    It's the little things that keep me reading Mr. Correia's work. And maybe some of the big things (zeppelins, Abominations, that sort of thing)

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  6. Now that is a cool idea.

    Are there many towers in the wild built on this pattern?

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  7. Very few. The largest is in Germany.

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  8. It looks as though it's a bit of a paradox; it has to be fully assembled before it hold any weight. How is that possible to construct? (I guess I'd have to watch one being built.)

    Jon

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  9. Jon, the cables are not one continuous length; the towers can be built in modules, more-or-less stacked using some temporary cables and a conventional crane. I'm not sure if they'd be amenable to a gin-pole but I suspect not.

    If you noodle around at Snelson's site, he has some nice tutorials. Modularity of a very simple "kite frame" structure is demonstrated there.

    He approaches these structures in a very common-sense way, the kind of "engineering imagination" approach I find appealing.

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