this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
6 points (80.0% liked)

Mars (Planet)

201 readers
1 users here now

This is a place to discuss everything about the planet Mars.

Art, community discussion & scientific data are all welcome.

Related communities:

About AI content: consider posting AI content to !mars_ai_pics@discuss.tchncs.de instead.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

you remember the last post i made in this community about farming on mars in small greenhouses?

yeah, that rings a bell. i just wanted to know how to construct these plastic tubes sothat they would hold 1 bar of pressure inside. so i did some calculations. they are a real mess, don't look at them:

(r/d is the ratio of the tube radius to the wall thickness btw. r/d = 300 is the point where it tears, so having a thicker wall than that should be fine)

i mostly wrote this down as a reminder for myself sothat i can roughly understand what i did later.

anyways, the results are: basically you can make such a tube with 10cm diameter easily out of polyethylene or any other type of polymer with only a wall strength of 1mm. it will hold, it won't burst. i used some insights from ultimate tensile strength, linear elasticity (Young's modulus) etc.

basically what i did is to assume that the force that the wall material exerts to push to the inside is equal to the gradient in spring-energy that would be stored inside the wall material depending on radius. So dW(r)/dr = F is the force with which the wall material pushes inward, where W(r) is the mechanical stress energy stored in a slice of the tube of 1mm thickness.

ask if you want to know something. i'm tired rn and can't tell what i might have missed.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 3 points 1 week ago

producing plastics on site is already possible with today's technology, from just water and CO2:

https://blog.bccresearch.com/global-co-based-plastics-market-turning-a-green-gas-into-valuable-polymers

if you want a keyword to read up on the whole process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas