Hydraulic Sea Elevators

A post explaining what this blog will be about will come next, but in the meantime, I have to tell this idea to somebody.

I've always wanted to build an underwater city, so it's something that occupies a lot of my otherwise unused brain power. Being sick at home today, I was lying in the bath, when I suddenly came up with a solution to one of the problems that has been plaguing me.

Moving things up and down in an underwater city is a major concern. Naturally, you'll want to establish trade with the land dwellers, or send boats to other underwater cities. That means that transporting people and goods up (to the cheaper to operate surface ships) and down (into the bowels of the city) is going to be a major part of life in an underwater town.

Some goods are not a problem really, just attach them to something buoyant enough and they'll shoot strait to the surface. Likewise, the right amount of weight will sink them slowly down the a landing platform. Some guide-wires and other safety precautions would be necessary, but it could be done with a little planning and regulation.

People, on the other hand, are generally going to be a problem. Moving them up and down too quickly, or too often can be very bad for them, especially if you are designing your cities to be able to exist in a large percentage of the ocean. The ocean is really deep in most places, and the pressure is a lot higher down below.

To a certain extent, the pressure inside the habitat can be a little lower than that of the ocean, but there comes a point where the folks upstairs have air thin enough that rapidly changing floors would be harmful or even fatal.

To resolve this problem, I propose an elevator that automatically adjusts the internal pressure over time, as it rise and falls, and has safety limiters in place to prevent people from traveling to new pressure zones more quickly than would be safe.

The design of the elevator itself is the main item today, but there are some logistical concerns that I will address as well.

The elevator car is a cylindrical plug, which separates a long tube into two sealed sections. The tube is allowed to fill with sea water by a series of valves. The car is considerably taller than the passenger compartment itself, as it is designed to compress somewhat as the water pressure increases, and we don't want people freaking out as the ceiling descends.

By sealing the valves, and then forcing water in or out of the separate sections of the tube, we can push the car up or down the pipe. Rails, or some similar measure would be needed to prevent the car from rotating as it rises and falls, so that the doors would line up.

Because the pressure inside the car is equal to the pressure on the current level, there is no need for an airlock at the elevator doors, only a bulkhead which can withstand the pressures inside the tube, which is assumed to be a solved problem by several aspects of this design. As the science of underwater engineering advances, elevators of this type will become viable at ever increasing depths.

To allow greater elevator speeds, it would be advisable to limit the number of floors that can be penetrated by a single elevator. Climbing five stories at a given speed is not the same ting as twenty and so-on. The number of floors varies depending on the speed of the elevator and the depth of the facility, so the safe height of an individual tube might vary considerably even within a given city.

At some point, it might be necessary to deny a person any further elevator travel until they have been examined by a medical expert. Medical facilities would need to be accessible from each level of the city, which isn't a bad idea anyway, as medical transport is a serious issue, and a staffed first-aid station on each floor, would allow for better triage.

This increases the amount of horizontal sprawl that is needed to make the city able to sustain itself economically, as nurses don't work at isolated research stations without compensation.

Now, I need to lie down some more.