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.

top 4 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] m0darn@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Have you looked at the characteristics of alginate? I ask because you'll want to make these tubes out of something you can source more of, because they will get damaged.

[–] 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

[–] gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

and as a follow-up calculation, i would do the same thing again, but this time not for small tubes to grow algae in, but instead for large human-sized habitats. i.e. a building for humans inside. i would like to know how much building material it would take, what would have to be the wall thickness, etc.

obviously that's gonna be much thicker than 10cm in diameter, more like 10 meters in diameter! and also not made of plastic, but steel, probably. i'll do the math another day though because i need to process all of this first.

[–] gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

also important notice: smaller tube sizes are preferable. because basically you want to half-fill these tubes with water, sothat the water covers a large part of the sun-lit surface area. and if the tubes become thicker, you're basically putting more water into it. i.e. the water depth increases.

if you have a tube with 10 cm diameter, it's gonna be half-filled with water, i.e. 5 cm of water deep. but if you take a tube with only 4 cm diameter, then the water would only be 2 cm deep. so basically you need less water to cover a certain area. because if you cover an area of 1m² 5cm deep, you'll need 50L of water, but if you only cover it 2cm deep, you only need 20L of water. you save 60%. thinner tube sizes are actually preferable.