Imperial College Transport Studies Unit – Seminar - 4pm to 5pm - 3rd Dec 2014.
Open
to all – Free entrance – Please Register here.
The Transport Internet &
Foodtubes Project Team are
presenting and discussing this planet saving project with scientists engineers
and students at Imperial College London, at 4 pm to 5 pm on Wednesday 3rd
December 2014. Dave Wetzel who was Vice-Chairman of Transport for
London will describe the impact on cities and citizens, Noel Hodson will outline the new project as a
basis for a new global transport industry and new jobs, and Professor Taylor will respond to technical questions
from the audience.
We invite Engineering under-graduates, graduates, tutors and all those who are
concerned about environmental issues and commerce - governments, banks,
pipeline companies, freight companies, food companies, civil engineers,
architects, media and concerned citizens etc. to attend. REGISTER on the Imperial website and
on Eventbrite.
(CONTACT
Mr Noel Hodson noel@noelhodson.com Tel 07713 681216)
The presentation slides http://www.noelhodson.com/images-FWT-imperial-V9DEC14.pdf
The presentation slides http://www.noelhodson.com/images-FWT-imperial-V9DEC14.pdf
*********************
The
Transport Internet™ and Foodtubes™ Discussion led by Noel Hodson
We hope to have
a lively discussion today, so I will set out the outline of this new freight
system in 20 minutes – Dave Wetzel will outline the impact on London, if the
system is installed here, and Fred Taylor will contribute technical information
during the general discussion.
I confess to having been an accountant from the age of 17; so my instinctive approach to projects is via business forecasts. I worked on transport statistics for more than ten years, to reduce commuting to work and business travel; by working from home by computer – Teleworking – working at a distance; or, in America, Telecommuting – commuting at a distance.
The promotion of Teleworking, from 1987 to date – has been successful. Today - About 12% of people work at home by computer on any one work day and most of us use laptops & mobiles to be location-free. My last fee for advising a major employer on The Economics of Telework, was in 2003 – from the World Health Organisation in Geneva – shortly after drafting Telework Guidelines for Transport for London, who employ 1,000+ desk workers in Victoria Street, Westminster.
Employers no
longer need Telework Consultants, so I turned my attention to reducing freight
traffic – and came up with the – The
Transport Internet™. Fred Taylor took the concept and made it a practical engineering
proposition.
The Transport
Internet™ & Foodtubes™ will carry Food and
Other Goods.
We have focussed
on Food because after Water, food is the next heaviest, necessary, daily cargo.
We all have to eat – and the food has to be transported from farm to plate. The
water we use is 120 times heavier than the food we cart home from shops. Also,
focusing on food – or in its broader context – on Supermarket goods, is helped
by the global statistics on food transport. One of the facts that emerge from
the mass of data is that 25% of all freight vehicles carry food – or
supermarket goods. Some studies show that 30% of all freight vehicles are engaged
on food deliveries.
In our
calculations we add “Other Suitable Goods” – non-food goods for homes,
factories, colleges, and so on; which with food, replaces 50% of the freight
vehicles travelling on our roads and rails – and via our airports and seaports.
The other half carry goods that are too large to fit into the Cargo-Capsules;
such as sofas, armchairs and double beds.
But – if you can
imagine London streets with half the number of vans and lorries – and imagine
Dover with half the number of freight vehicles crossing the Channel, as our
pipelines will also be installed under seas, you will start to see some of the
advantages of The Transport Internet™.
The engineering
principles are based on Minimum Weight Vehicles (MWVs).
Let’s consider
the water we each use. A bath-full of water is very heavy – it comes in clean –
goes out grey – and is transported by pipelines. IF, IF… all our water
were to be delivered and taken away by trucks; every road, worldwide, would be gridlocked. The delivery
trucks would weigh many times their cargoes – would also carry heavy loads of
diesel fuel – and need large drivers, munching hedgehog sandwiches.
After a month or
two of such chaos and waste of energy – some bright engineer would invent
pipelines. Fortunately, mankind invented the water pipeline before the internal
combustion engine – about 5,000 years before.
The engineering
questions are – “What are we trying to transport? And what is the most
efficient vehicle?” It comes down to the parcel-to-vehicle weight ratio. For
water – we convert the entire
transport infrastructure of iron trucks, noisy engines, metalled roads, railways, signals, police, loveable parking wardens, fuel supplies – and hedgehog eating drivers – into pipelines. Mankind transports only the goods we want. We do this at very low cost, silently and invisibly.
Mankind has done
the same with gas and oil. The world has a million kilometres of large diameter
pipelines. These pipes are installed in all regions – over-ground, underground,
through mountains, deserts and wilderness, through cities and under oceans. Our
civilisation would collapse without these silently flowing cargoes.
The Transport
Internet™ applies the same pipeline principles to Food supplies. It is a
pipeline system for dry goods. It uses only 8% of the energy currently used to
transport our food (and other goods). 92% of the diesel or energy used now for
this transport, today, is not used to move the cargoes, but to move the vehicles
– lorries, vans, trains, ships and planes.
Pipelines have
been around for 5,000 years – pneumatic powered capsules date back to about
1850. In this project we considered but abandoned the cast iron, steam and
huffing and puffing of glorious Victorian engineering – “The great iron horse
that crosses the prairies” in favour of lightweight electricity and 21st
century software.
When we first
assembled the Foodtubes
Team, in 2005, we focused on pneumatic powered capsules running through the
pipelines, picturing larger version of the 6 inch or 31 cm wide air driven
capsules that still whizz around some stores – recently revived to shuttle
documents around banks.
However, pneumatics require valves, pumps, gates and many moving parts, and will not work well on the scale envisioned for The Transport Internet™. Instead we immobilised the power source and made it part of the pipeline infrastructure by embedding the drive coils for a Linear Induction Motor between the rails in the pipes on which the capsules run. The skeleton of the capsules are rectangular boxes measuring 1 x 1 x 2 metres and sit on wheeled bogies which remain on the rails while the cargo is loaded or unloaded. The soft-iron or other magnetic material plate that forms the other half of the LIM is incorporated into the bogie. The capsule cases are likely to be customised for major users e.g. such as TESCO.
Network control
software is used to track the position and speed of every capsule with high
precision and to apply the power to the LIMS as required. Additional coils are
located at junctions, including sidings at each loading or delivery location,
to steer the capsules with no moving parts or points in the rails. The boxes
containing the goods are simple and inexpensive and are loaded and unloaded
automatically by robots at high speed before returning the capsule to the
circuit.
The LIMs we will
use are about the size of a briefcase.
Like pneumatics,
LIMs also date back to Victorian times. Encased in resin, they are the first
solid state electronics – wholly reliable – in use safely all over the world.
Currently they are being tested by the US to launch planes off aircraft
carriers. Terminal 5 Heathrow uses them to cart luggage round its system. There
are thousands of LIMs used in Disneyworld and other fairgrounds.
The LIMs enable our
cargo-capsules to have no engines, no internal propulsion at all. The
cargo-capsules are therefore ultra-lightweight vehicles - MWVs. The capsules
can be made of fibre-glass, carbon fibre, aluminium and other lightweight
materials.
Even carrying
quarry stone, the large diameter pipelines will last 100 years before major
overhaul (Dr
Jonathan Carter – Imperial College Engineering – 2009). In forecasts we
assume a 50 year life.
The pipes can be made of concrete, steel,
iron, or, our preference – from polyethylene. Polyethylene has been proven for
decades in the water, oil and gas pipeline industries. It is not only easy to
install polyethylene pipes using no-dig-technology (no open trenches in the
streets above) but burying polyethylene, made from oil, also sequesters or
stores carbon and helps to combat climate change gases.
Many non-engineers
cannot imagine how The Transport Internet™ pipelines could be installed to serve,
say the whole of Greater London - and eventually the world. The concept is too
large to easily envisage. But installation
– and the resulting commercial factors – is broken down into bite sized
civil-engineering and financeable chunks.
A typical Dense-Urban
Circuit is installed as a 100 km loop or circuit, costing $4M per km; mostly
underground for security and aesthetic reasons, with 400 Terminals – entrances
and exits. The cargo-capsules all travel in the same direction, returning empty
capsules to their base stations free of charge. Imagine a circuit installed in
Croydon, London – with 130,000 homes to feed (via the shops) – it will take
1,400 food & general goods vehicles
per day off the streets – and so relieve Croydon’s chronic gridlocks. The
Croydon Circuit will run from a cargo-transfer depot on the M25. It will cost
about $400 million and make $60 million profit a year.
For several
reasons – installation, loading, handling, tracking etc. we currently plan for
the pipelines to be 1.5 metres in diameter – with capsules varying in length up
to 2 metres – about the size of a large man - and having a lesser diameter - for
wiggle room – room to negotiate junctions, bends and inclines. Specialised
capsules will include ones that are refrigerated, shorter (to climb tall
buildings and be easily handled), transparent for visual inspection; and ones
for dirty or dangerous cargoes. Very specialised capsules, Pipeline Inspection
Gauges – PIGS, as used in the pipeline industry, will be equipped to deal with
engineering and blockage problems. Our current commercial plan also budgets for
maintenance shafts from the surface.
A
Typical-Circuit might then be installed in the next district, say in Richmond, similarly
of 100 km, and the two circuits will be interlinked.
Because there
are no valves, doors or barriers, cargo-capsules can run freely through both
circuits. The wider effect – say for Greater London – is like a honeycomb of
Typical Circuits. For long distance
travel – say, London to Manchester – elongated loops will be installed.
Eventually a loaded capsule could be sent from Cape Town to Edinburgh with no
human intervention. Speeds will vary from as low as 5km per hour in very dense
networks – to 150km per hour on long connecting runs.
Dense Urban
circuits, where there are many thousands of homes – are both the most useful to
society and the most profitable to own. Urban, Rural and Wilderness Circuits
can be installed at far lower cost than Dense Urban circuits – but will carry
less traffic.
The recommended
transport-price per capsule is a one-price-fits-all
of $5 or £3 - using the same logic as the Victorian postal service one-price
Penny Stamp. The revenue will be automatically divided across all circuits travelled
– similar to the way telephone charges are shared across networks. We calculate
the base cost of transporting a capsule at $2 dollars, less than any existing freight
system – earning a 70% profit. Skilled professionals can check & change the
50 variables in our Greater
London EXCEL model.
Each Terminal –
entrance or exit – for example an entry point shared by a row of shops or
offices – will be fenced into a security cage. Registered senders (and
receivers) will have access to Terminals using a Transport Internet™ Debit card
– which also acts as an identity key to the secure area. All capsules will be auto-scanned – many
times per journey – for banned cargoes – particularly people.
The Transport
Internet™ (TTI) cargo-capsules are no more of a security risk than the millions
of cars and freight vehicles travelling the roads & rails today.
One reason for
setting the maximum size of cargo-capsules as 1 metre x 2 metres is to
accommodate man-handling at Terminals. Many capsules will emerge at and be sent
from remote Terminals, say, on farms, where they will be handled by one or two
persons – by hand. Much larger capsules – say filled with bottles of beer,
could be far too cumbersome.
In engineering terms, it may be obvious that to create a global Transport Internet, all our pipelines must be built using the same dimensions, protocols and specifications; to allow capsules free passage everywhere. Our project Team’s main function is to coordinate the design and to act as guardian of the standard specifications.
Similarly the
commercial specifications and the pricing need to be co-ordinated. All Circuit-Owners
will buy and sign a Franchise Agreement.
The Transport Internet™ Inventors have invested £1.5 million to date in this idea. We own the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The broad overall concept for The Transport Internet™, using pipes and LIMs, we are advised is not readily patentable; but we have prior published the concept and do own defensible copyright and design rights in all the work since 2005. Our legally defensible patents, several dozen, will vest in the detail of the “How-To” work, in the engineering blueprints, the commercial blueprints and in the controlling software. These protections will all be put in place alongside the first major financial and engineering step – to build a 3 km Sales Demonstration Circuit – currently planned to be sited at Spadeadam, Cumbria, UK.
END
