It is cool that they don't disturb the surface vegetation or topsoil by simply dumping dredge tailings on the surface. Their method reminds me of injecting expanding foam underneath concrete slabs to lift and level them.
"Flood-prone terrain is then elevated by injecting a wood-based slurry 15–300 feet underground"
This is the part that's odd to me. A wood-based slurry? If there's high organic content in the pump material, won't that decompose (and settle down) over time? I would think that they would want to use something less organic (such as dredge tailings) as their fill material.
They say it's compact within a few hours and doesn't need much time to settle before it's ready to be built on -- but how long does it last?
> Flood-prone terrain is then elevated by injecting a wood-based slurry 15–300 feet underground.
> The Ark system is sized to lift an acre by a foot each day.
this sounds like science fiction, it would need to uniformly lift between 18.500 and 370.000 cubic meter of soil/rock by 30cm a day.
300.000 m³ soil/rock would weigh something like 600.000 tonnes and would require ~1.8 GJ to lift by one foot even with zero loss and discounting all other factors apart from lifting the mass.
1.8GJ is pretty much exactly 500kWh? That's not awful in terms of energy, although intuitively I suspect that the real-world energy used would be at least an order of magnitude higher than the gravitational potential energy gain.
is the real market for this type of technology. Inject clay - or sand- and create basins, channels and quanats - made from different types of soil that is basically 3d printed into the underground.
Printing foundations for housing in flood prone areas, seems to be a trivial side hussle compared to keeping the foundations of society going.
Our technology stack starts with Atlas, our mover.
Atlas transports Prometheus, our pumping pod, and Vulcan, our drilling pod, around the site.
Once Vulcan drills the wells, we deploy an Ark and enough Prometheus pods to complete the lift.
Atlas roams the site all day - moving pods, recharging, and mapping terrain in real time.
The Ark connects to each Prometheus pod via a slurry transport line.
Flood-prone terrain is then elevated by injecting a wood-based slurry 15–300 feet underground.
1 acre-foot = 1200 cubic meters. That amount of wood chip is needed per day per machine. So perhaps 1000 medium trees worth per day, or 10,000 small trees. If it's waste chip then might make some sense on limited scale. If the conditions inside the mud are anoxic, then the chips don't turn into CO2.
It's also an alternative to wood trunks used as piles + earth/mud in between, like used in Venice. Venice is extremely dense, no space for cars or industry.
Terranova, Ark, Prometheus, Atlas, vulcan... + the whole roaster of open positions. Sounds like AInnovation slop on highest temp setting just went on a wild fishing session for the cringiest names in recent scifi blockbusters.
Readit News
"Flood-prone terrain is then elevated by injecting a wood-based slurry 15–300 feet underground"
This is the part that's odd to me. A wood-based slurry? If there's high organic content in the pump material, won't that decompose (and settle down) over time? I would think that they would want to use something less organic (such as dredge tailings) as their fill material.
They say it's compact within a few hours and doesn't need much time to settle before it's ready to be built on -- but how long does it last?
Dead Comment
this sounds like science fiction, it would need to uniformly lift between 18.500 and 370.000 cubic meter of soil/rock by 30cm a day.
300.000 m³ soil/rock would weigh something like 600.000 tonnes and would require ~1.8 GJ to lift by one foot even with zero loss and discounting all other factors apart from lifting the mass.
is the real market for this type of technology. Inject clay - or sand- and create basins, channels and quanats - made from different types of soil that is basically 3d printed into the underground.
Printing foundations for housing in flood prone areas, seems to be a trivial side hussle compared to keeping the foundations of society going.
Dead Comment
Our technology stack starts with Atlas, our mover. Atlas transports Prometheus, our pumping pod, and Vulcan, our drilling pod, around the site. Once Vulcan drills the wells, we deploy an Ark and enough Prometheus pods to complete the lift. Atlas roams the site all day - moving pods, recharging, and mapping terrain in real time. The Ark connects to each Prometheus pod via a slurry transport line. Flood-prone terrain is then elevated by injecting a wood-based slurry 15–300 feet underground.
Is demo available, where can I play this?
It's also an alternative to wood trunks used as piles + earth/mud in between, like used in Venice. Venice is extremely dense, no space for cars or industry.
Also, US MIC is probably aroused.