Adaptive Allotropy
Company History
Section titled “Company History”Adaptive Allotropy made their first breakthrough in transparent silicon bucky-structures in the late 2030s. Fortunately, an unmanned test mission saw these windows explode after a mere 6 minutes in Low Earth Orbit, leading to a further 6 years of painstaking research before their certification for mission use.
Company Product Summary
Section titled “Company Product Summary”Adaptive Allotropy supplies windows made from silicon bucky-structure 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. 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
Section titled “Product Pricing”| Product | Price per unit | Additional Information |
|---|---|---|
| Silicon Buckystructure Windows | $1000 per m³ | Excludes shipping from Bellevistat. Material Density = 2.25 g/cm³ |
Bulk Discount Table
| 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
Section titled “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; 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 above are 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.