R
rogers_buck
Guest
I'm thinking about a method for fabrication of large solar sail, solar collector, or even orbital habitat structures. The idea is that you orbit a tank of liquid polymer that will harden when exposed to UV - fairly common stuff. The tank would be equipped with an axial dispenser on one of its ends. The method of deployment would be to spin the tank at a pretty good RPM with the dispenser facing the sun.<br /><br />As the polymer is pumped out of the tank it will naturally form a disk by balancing cohesive and centrifugal forces. The sun's UV will then freeze that polymer so it will no longer spread out. Polymer is being continuously pumped onto the center of the forming disk by the dispenser from the side of the forming disk shaded by the sun. This is important, because the solidified polymer will screen the liquid polymer from the UV until the new liquid polymer fans out to the edge of what was solidified adding to the circumference of the disk before it too is solidified by UV (no longer shaded). And so on until the desired diameter is achieved and the polymer tank is empty.<br /><br />The physics of this are quite interesting and the growing surface area that needs to be covered is automatically accomodated by a slowing down of the rotation of the tank-disk system. The pump needs only excrete the polymer at a steady rate. The natural physics take care of all the dynamics.<br /><br />Using this method it should be possible to construct a large flat disk of polymer film with an extremely simple mechanism. The ultimate size of such a disk is constrained only by the strenght and cohesive properties of the polymer.<br /><br />Once a disk is fabricated in this manner, it can be aluminized by an electric evaporation of aluminum or gold.<br /><br />To create a space habitat from two such prepared disks, the disks would need to be docked together and a robotic welder could crawl along the circumferences of the disks joining them together. After the edges are welded togethe