Adaptive Allotropy

Company History

Adaptive Allotropy made their first breakthough in transparent silicon bucky-structures in the late 2030s. Fortunately unmanned test mission saw these windows explode after a mere 6 minutes in Low earth orbit, and led to a further 6 years of painstaking research before their certification of mission use.

Company Product Summary

Adaptive Allotropy supplies windows made from silicon bucky-structures materials for use on space settlements. With proper sealing, standard 12 mm thick windows with rectangular side length no greater than 0.91 m can retain up to a 1.01 bar pressure difference across them. The allowable safe span doubles if the thickness of the window is doubled, while the allowable pressure difference squares with the increase in thickness (e.g. doubling the thickness allows for four times the pressure difference). Refer to the Relevant Physics section below for more information about this. If never exposed to direct sunlight of solar intensity greater than 300 W/m2, windows provide adequate radiation and thermal insulation, however they are prone to brittle failure.

Product Pricing

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Product Price per unit Additional Information
Silicon Buckystructure Windows $1000 per m3 Excludes shipping from Bellevistat. Material Density = 2.25 g/cm3
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Quantity of identical units Bulk Discount (round unit price to nearest $0.01)
1-10 0%
10-50 5%
50-100 10%
100-200 15%
200-400 20%
400-1000 25%
1000-2000 30%
2000-10000 35%%
>10000 40%

Relevant Physics for Product

The maximum stress within the window pane can be calculated using the following equation for square windows: σmax = (Δp L2) / (2 t2) where Δp is the pressure difference in Pa, L is the span in m, t is the thickness in m, and σmax is the maximum allowable tensile stress in the material, 290.1 MPa. For circular windows, the equation is σmax = (3Δp D2) / (4 t2) where D is the diameter in m. Windows may be ordered in other shapes and when justifying the thickness for these, you can approximate the window as square and replace L2 by multiplying the longest dimension of the window by its longest perpendicular component.

The equations outlined above have been obtained using Kirchhoff Plate Bending Theory for plates with clamped edges under uniform pressure loads (typically a second or third year topic at university). If you want to read up about this theory and see the derivation for circular plates, please look at this Wikipedia page.

Solar intensity refers to the amount of energy received from the sun in a given unit area across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. This is important for thermal considerations, as well as for the design of things such as solar panels which generate their power from this sunlight.

This webpage refers to a fictional company which is part of the UK Space Design Competition. No information presented here or implied herefrom should be regarded as factual. Any similarities with real events, places, or persons are purely coincidental.