Just Another Sports And General News Blog

I came across this surfing around online and it really caught my attention.

The government, the council i have no idea who will fund it, but they plan to build a massive geodesic dome over houston, yes that is right, they are just going to put a great big dome around houston.

Houston,  Texas is a vulnerable city, and has always been subject to storms and hurricanes and if its isnt raining its very hot.

They spend a fortune annualy to repair and maintain the city, the last cyclone cost the city nearly 10 billion and forced the closure of the city centre .

Some say that with the effects of global warming, this is eventually going to make Houston unlivable.

So their answer is to challenge the frontiers of science and technology and build the single largest structure in the world.

The Houston Dome will be constructed from a framework of 396 000 steel struts with the design being so stable, that 75 000 could fail before the structure would become unstable. The surface would be over 21 million square feet.

Inside that framework will be a inflatable panels of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene or ETFE which has burst onto the construction scene being the same material that the watercube at the beijing olympics is made of.

ETFE is extremely light, being just 1% of the weight of glass, if any panels were ever accidentaly detached from the framework, it would more float than fall back to the ground.

Even using modern materials, the construction of the dome is impossible using conventional methods, so houston is thinking outside the box, and one of the thoughts floating around (literally) is to support the dome and carry materials using dirigibles, filled with helium, these ships could stay airborne for hours.

This is very intruiging to me and no doubt i will be writing more about it in the future.