Ventilating Mines with Repurposed Airplane Engines

[Image: A "Jeffrey Portable Blower," once billed as the "highest efficiency in mine ventilation, insuring [sic] a continuous and abundant supply of fresh air under every operating condition." Image courtesy of Kentucky Coal Heritage].

I had never heard of a "Gorniczy Agregat Gasniczy" apparatus prior to the Pike River Mine disaster still unfolding in New Zealand, where one such device is about to be deployed.

The GAG, as it's known, is "a jet engine inertisation unit developed for use in mines, controlling and suppressing coal seam fires," Wikipedia explains—another way of saying that it is literally a jet engine that you plug into one end of a sealed mine in order to blow high-powered chemical winds (carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor) into the tunnels below. These gases then "lower the oxygen levels, suppressing fires and forcing methane out of the mine."

[Image: A GAG unit being readied in New Zealand, courtesy of the New Zealand Herald News].

There are only three operational GAG units in the world right now, apparently. Each operates by taking a "docking position" on the earth's surface, attached to "intake ventilation headings" that lead, via boreholes, into the porous labyrinth of artificial caves below. The GAG then rapidly pumps a new atmosphere into the existing mineworks, as if generating artificial weather underground. In a paper on "jet engine inertisation techniques," Stewart Bell points out that "a variation of this device was used, mounted on a remotely controlled tank, to extinguish the oil well fires in Kuwait following the Gulf War."

As Jonathan Rennie, the person who originally pointed this machine out to me, added: "I wonder what alternative structures it could be plugged into and what alternative gases could be pumped." Indeed. Weaponized jet-engine army battering rams used to clear enemy houses of hidden combatants. Emergency subway ventilation machines. Alcoholic mist-dissemination units for avant-garde cocktail parties. Underground deodorant guns.

As it happens, the specialty subfield of preventing and/or extinguishing underground mine fires comes with a wide range of spatial and material techniques. These include the controlled "injection" of instant gel-foam barriers (operated via "an underground-based mobile gel preparation and injection system"), in order to block airflow through the mines, and the installation of ventilation control devices (VCDs), or rapidly deployed explosive barriers.

Looking into this latter architectural form—if we can treat underground ventilation control devices as a form of spatial design—led me to something called the "TestSafe Explosions Gallery" in Queensland, Australia—a kind of experimental underground explosion lab that operates as "a full-scale pressure test facility for ventilation control devices (VCDs) within Australia."

[Image: The Lake Lynn Experimental Mine facility; image courtesy of the CDC].

This "full-scale pressure test facility" joins another Aussie site, called the Lake Lynn Experimental Mine (LLEM), "a highly sophisticated underground and surface facility where large-scale explosion trials and mine fire research is conducted."

The workings are located in a massive limestone deposit. Entries are sized to match those of commercial mines, making them authentic, full-scale test galleries. Movable bulkheads permit the setup of single-entry, triple-entry, and longwall face configurations for experiments. The underground test areas are amply instrumented and coupled to a remote control center at the surface. Research conducted at this facility includes large-scale gas and coal dust explosion studies, conveyor belt flammability trials, and evaluations of explosive materials and mine stoppings. In addition, diesel, ground control, and emergency response and rescue research is conducted here.

I'm increasingly convinced that these sorts of highly specific sites need to be cataloged within the architectural world—or, at the very least, within the world of landscape research and design. Put another way, in the long line of accepted building typologies—the library, the stadium, the prison, the house, the theater—it's a shame not to see mine-fire research facilities more frequently listed...

In any case, Jonathan Rennie, who first pointed out Gorniczy Agregat Gasniczy devices to me, also forwarded a link to the homepage of Andrzej M. Wala, a mine engineering professor at the University of Kentucky with a research focus on subsurface ventilation techniques—mapping and predicting atmospheric effects in highly confined quarters below ground. As part of this, Wala has pioneered work in simulating the spread of underground fires using VENTGRAPH "mine fire simulation software" (as opposed to VENTSIM "mine ventilation simulation software").

"The essential work program of the project," Wala and his co-authors explain, "was built around the introduction of fire simulation computer software and the consequent modeling of fire scenarios in selected mine with different layouts." At stake here is a comprehensive understanding of the geometry of underground airflow:

The importance of understanding complex ventilation networks such as those with diagonal connections has been discussed. It is important to identify and understand their potential effects on the mine ventilation network as the airflow through the diagonal connections could reverse or stop due to the changes in the adjoining branches within the ventilation network. Mining companies need to identify the existing and potential diagonal connections in their ventilation system and analyze how these connections will affect their ventilation system especially in the case of fires. Training is necessary to equip mine ventilation personnel how to identify and minimize diagonal connections in their ventilation system.

Indeed, we read elsewhere, underground facilities are often subject to sudden, potentially disastrous "windblasts," an atmospheric effect generated under certain spatial conditions: "These conditions include the geological configuration and the dimensions of the mining excavation (mine layout)." It's like spatially-induced turbulence inside the earth.

[Image: The Wieliczka Salt Mine and its surface weather station; image courtesy of NOAA].

So there is weather underground, then. In fact, it is interesting to note in this context that the famed Wieliczka Salt Mine outside Krakow, Poland, has its own weather station monitoring the atmospheric conditions underground. The station operates in tandem with a distributed network of microclimate sensors and a massive dehumidification system: "Although the dehumidification system is not yet operating exactly as desired... 'tuning' of the dehumidification system is planned and is expected to completely solve the mine's moisture problem."

I'm reminded of a passage from the Aeneid that I often cite here on BLDGBLOG, in which Virgil describes the underground storm-storage facilities of King Aeolus, who "rules the contending winds and moaning gales" of the Mediterranean by "imprisoning" them inside artificial caves that he has excavated beneath the "granite of high mountains." A kind of mythic weather-emperor, King Aeolus exhibits a knowledge of underground atmospheric dynamics that the programmers of VENTGRAPH and the operators of the Wieliczka dehumidification system should envy.

[Image: Holland Tunnel exhaust tower, ventilating the underworld; photo via SkyscraperPage.com].

Finally, all this talk of subterranean ventilation compels me to mention David Gissen's short history of New York's urban ventilation control structures—specifically, the design of exhaust towers for the Holland Tunnel.

In a brief section of his recent book Subnature: Architecture's Other Environments, Gissen describes these structures as "strange buildings" that "collapsed" the difference between architecture and civil engineering:

The Holland Tunnel spanned an enormous 8,500 feet. At each end, engineers designed ten-story ventilation towers that would push air through tunnels above the cars, drawing the vehicle exhaust upward, where it would be blown back through the tops of the towers and over industrial areas of the city. The exhaust towers provided a strange new building type in the city—a looming blank tower that oscillated between a work of engineering and architecture.

The very idea here that urban infrastructure—such as trans-river commuter tunnels or an underground subway—might be atmospherically comparable to deep coal mines is fascinating; the possibility that spatial techniques learned in one of these fields might be equally applicable in the other is equally of interest.

It is these moments of marginal, shared spatial expertise that continue to fascinate me, offering, as they do, unexpected perspectives on the built environment—both above and below the ground.

(Meanwhile, check out this image of 16th-century mine ventilation works, in which "revolving wooden wind vanes fitted to the top of mine ventilation shafts... acted as extractor fans sucking stale air from the mine.")

Spatial Gameplay in Full-Court 3D

Japan is distinguishing its bid to host the 2022 World Cup with a plan to broadcast the entire thing as a life-size hologram.

[Image: Courtesy of the Japan Football Association/CNN].

"Japanese organizers say each game will be filmed by 200 high definition cameras, which will use 'freeviewpoint' technology to allow fans to see the action unfold from a player's eye view—the kind of images until now only seen in video games," CNN reports.

[Image: Courtesy of the Japan Football Association/CNN].

British football theorist Jonathan Wilson puts an interestingly spatial spin on the idea: "Speaking as a tactics geek," he said to CNN, "the problem watching games on television is it's very hard to see the shape of the teams, so if you're trying to assess the way the game's going, if you're trying to assess the space, how a team's shape's doing and their defense and organization, then this will clearly be beneficial."

Watching a sport becomes a new form of spatial immersion into strategic game geometries.

[Image: Courtesy of the Japan Football Association/CNN].

Of course, there's open disbelief that Japan can actually deliver on this promise—it is proposing something based on technology that does not quite exist yet, on the optimistic assumption that all technical problems will be worked out in 12 years' time.

But the idea of real-time, life-size event-holograms being beamed around the world as a spatial replacement for TV imagery is stunning.

(Thanks to Judson Hornfeck for the tip!)

Stationary Cinema

[Image: Wallpaper by Studio Carnovsky, via Creative Review].

This wallpaper, designed by Studio Carnovsky, changes images depending on what color light you view it under. As such, it could be an incredibly interesting thing to experiment with in other contexts—including outdoor urban lighting, public signage, and even film animation.

[Image: Wallpaper by Studio Carnovsky, via Creative Review].

In the latter case, imagine a hallway whose wallpaper is printed with six or seven closely related scenes from an animated clip; each "scene" is printed in a different color. A light programmed to move through the appropriate sequence of color changes is then installed in the same corridor; as it flashes from color to color, changing perhaps every half-second, you see what appears to be a moving image on the walls around you.

It would be a kind of unmoving zoetrope—a stationary cinema in printed form (or a stationary cinema in stationery form?).

[Images: Wallpaper by Studio Carnovsky, via Creative Review].

Even if only used for interior decoration, however, the effect is well worth exploring further.

(Thanks to a tip from Tim Maly).

Architecturally Armed

[Image: Photo by Vincent Fournier, courtesy of Wired UK].

This morning's post about a robot-city on the slopes of Mount Fuji reminded me of this thing called the CyberMotion Simulator, operated by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany (and featured in this month's issue of Wired UK).

The Simulator, Wired writes, is "a RoboCoaster industrial robotic arm adapted and programmed to simulate an F1 Ferrari F2007."

Testers are strapped into a cabin two metres above ground, and use a steering wheel, accelerator and brake to control CyberMotion. The simulator can provide accelerations of 2G and its display shows a 3D view of the circuit at Monza. The arm's six axes allow for the replication of twists and turns on the track and can even turn the subjects upside down.

But I'm curious what everyday architectural uses such a robo-arm might have. An office full of moving cubicles held aloft by black robotic arms that lift, turn, and rotate each desk based on who the worker wants to talk to; mobile bedroom furniture for a depressed ex-astronaut; avant-garde set design for a new play in East London; a vertigo-treatment facility designed by Aristide Antonas; surveillance towers for traffic police in outer Tokyo; a hawk-watching platform in Fort Washington State Park.

You show up for your first day of high school somewhere in a Chinese colonial city in central Africa and find that everyone—in room after room, holding hundreds of people—is sitting ten feet off the ground in these weird and wormy chairs, dipping and weaving and reading Shakespeare.

Maunsell Nation

[Image: From Anti Syn Nation by Jonas Loh].

I like this tiny model of the Maunsell Towers, part of Jonas Loh's Anti Syn Nation project—"a speculative micro nation," he writes, supported by the "natural genetic engineering" of sea slugs. But I think someone should make a chess set entirely from Maunsell-tower like oil platforms and other modular microutopias at sea—or perhaps just a student thesis project presented using custom-milled chess pieces, with elaborate spatial rules governing the resulting game.

The Robot A-Z

[Image: The yellow chipboards of the Fanuc global headquarters; courtesy of Fanuc].

On the flight back to Los Angeles yesterday I read about the corporate campus of Fanuc, "a secretive maker of robots and industrial automation gear," according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

"Some 60 percent of the world's precision machine tools use Fanuc's controls," the article explains, "which give lathes, grinders, and milling machines the agility to turn metal into just about any manufactured product." As if suggesting a future art installation by Jeff Koons—sponsored by Boeing—we read about a man who uses "a milling machine with Fanuc controls to sculpt 747 parts." (The company's robot A-Z shows off their other goods).

[Image: Assembly robots by Fanuc].

But it's the description of the firm's actual facilities that caught my eye. "Fanuc's headquarters, a sprawling complex in a forest on the slopes of Mount Fuji, looks like something out of a sci-fi flick":

Workers in yellow jumpsuits with badges on their shoulders trot among yellow buildings as yellow cars hum along pine-lined roads. Fanuc lore holds that the founder, Seiuemon Inaba, believed yellow "promotes clear thinking."Inside the compound's windowless factories, an army of (yes, yellow) robots works 24/7. "On a factory floor as big as a football field you might see four people. It's basically just robots reproducing themselves."

Thing is, if you want to see more—to see this strange origin-site for contemporary intelligent machines—you can't. "Outsiders are rarely allowed inside the facility, and workers not engaged in research are barred from labs," Businessweek adds. "'I can't even get in,' quips a board member who asks that his name not be used."

In a way, I'm reminded of South Korea's plans for its own "Robot Land," an "industrial city built specifically for the robotics industry," that will have "all sorts of facilities for the research, development, and production of robots, as well as things like exhibition halls and even a stadium for robot-on-robot competitions."

Here, though, alone amidst other versions of themselves in the pines of Mt. Fuji, "the world's most reliable robots" take shape in secret, shelled in yellow, reproducing themselves, forming a robot city of their own.

First-Strike Reforestation

Earlier this month, Macleans looked at the idea of "aerial reforestation," or the large-scale dropping of tree seedlings using decommissioned military aircraft. Of course, we looked at this same plan many, many years ago—and it turns out the same guy is behind this latest round of journalistic interest.

[Image: Courtesy of Getty Images/Macleans].

Moshe Alamaro, still affiliated with MIT, had previously been pushing his plan for "using a small fertilizing plane to drop saplings in plastic pods one at a time from a hopper," Macleans explains. The biodegradable canisters would then have "hit the ground at 200 m.p.h.," MIT explained back in 1997, "and imbed themselves in the soil. Then the canisters decompose and the young trees take root. A large aircraft could drop as many as 100,000 saplings in a single flight: Alamaro's system could plant as many as a million trees in one day."

But, Macleans points out, "it wasn’t very fruitful—most pods hit debris during pilot tests and failed to actually take root."

The idea has thus now been "upgraded," using different technical means "to create new forests on empty landscapes."

The process Alamaro advocates places trees in metal pods that rot on contact with the ground, instead of the low-tech and less sturdy plastic version. He says the process can be adapted to plant shrubs, and would work best in places with clear, loose soil, such as sub-desert parts of the Middle East, or newly habitable Arctic tundra opened up by global warming. “What is needed is government policy to use old military aircraft,” he says, adding that thousands are in hangars across the globe. Although the original pitch failed, Alamaro says the growing carbon market is creating new interest, and he hopes to find funding for a large-scale pilot project soon. Once Alamaro gets planes in the air, the last step, says [Dennis Bendickson, professor of forestry], will be to simply “get people out of the way.”

In this context, it's difficult to resist pointing out Iceland's own soil-bombing campaign: "Iceland is big and sparsely populated," the BBC reported in 2005. "There are few roads. So, Icelanders decided to 'bomb their own country'," dropping special mixtures of fertiliser and seeds "from a WWII DC 3 Dakota"—carpet-bombing subarctic desert in an attempt to make that emptiness flower.

I feel compelled here to point out a brief scene from the film Hellboy 2, in which we see a "forest god" killed in the streets of Brooklyn (roughly 2:36 in this clip); his green and bubbling blood blooms instantly into a carpet of soft roots and lichen, splashing onto the roofs of cars, sending seedpods from wildflowers and pollinating plants down in drifts along the New York sidewalks. Should a substance that fertile be developed in real life, Alamaro's—and Iceland's—plans could be realized in the blink of an eye.

In any case, will Alamaro finally succeed? Will we see whole new woodsy landscapes grow in the wake of sustained rural bombing campaigns—druidic warfare—cryptoforests spreading out from craters and abandoned fields far below? Will we launch seed grenades from sapling artillery, plant improvised explosive devices packed dense with forest nutrients?

(Story found via @treestrategist).