Andrew Wagner
Mar 12, 2024
In the 80 years because the stunning collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington, engineers have actually developed suspended structures to decrease their universal weak point: resonance. If not created to handle oscillations triggered by forces like wind, the frequency of these forces would trigger stress to construct and undoubtedly break the structure.
When Jim Clair took a look at how to focus mirrors at a focused solar power plant, he considered suspending the mirrors on cable televisions however kept in mind the images of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge shaking itself apart. To identify how well these suspended photovoltaic panels would hold up to possibly devastating oscillations, Clair, and his business Skysun LLC in Cleveland, Ohio, looked for the assistance of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in 2016 to validate his style was safe from unsafe resonance.
Trevor Jones, a dynamicist at Glenn, went to neighboring Lorain County Community College to deal with a model of the system. Jones caused vibrations in the cable televisions with hammers and took measurements of the resulting oscillations. Based upon this information, Jones created a program that might precisely design the style’s tensile strength versus wind-induced oscillations at any scale. With the measurements plugged in, the program did the mathematics and showed that Clair’s concept would work without shaking apart.
Today, Skysun constructs numerous suspended solar power generation systems, varying from the hammock-like Skysun Solar Pollinator to full-sized solar pergolas that supply both electrical power and shade.
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