National Geographic Channel Engineering Connections Super Rig Troll A Gas Platform Full HD

the troll gas plant is the largest object ever moved by man across the surface of the earth but deep in engineering DNA a connection to some surprising answer you see this immense structure just wouldn't be possible if it weren't for a highly unusual family tree that includes an Devon racing car failed suspension and the nature of a single musical movement how do please connect with one of the tallest structures in the 70 [Music] I'm on a journey to reveal the engineering triumphs embedded in the tallest concrete structure in the seven feet the troll a gas planet located 70 kilometres of Norway in the stormy North Sea it's not immediately apparent how big the trolley is this structure is so enormously hard to get your head round a must-read underwater standing here is the equivalent of being on top of the Empire State Building with the scene coming up to the 80th floor [Music] even on dry land building the half kilometer high platform would have been daunting for any engineer the troll has to withstand one of the most hostile marine environments on the planet so legs will take a battering during their life if you want to get up close and personal with them there's only one way getting down to see them 60 metres below I've never flown on a boat luckily the weather today is kind they can't even launch the boat if the waves are over three meters high [Music] trol can expect to be hit by waves 30 meters come right up to the base of the platform these legs will have to keep trolls standing till 2066 they've got to be strong but amazingly they've also got to be flexible to bend to the force of the waves building them called for a special kind of concrete the concrete used to build it and his roofs in a gun with a man whose only desire was to find a decent flowerpot today concrete is the most widely used man-made material in the world and it's been around for a long time the Romans used it almost 2,000 years ago but the Roman version would not have been good enough for the troll it wouldn't lend but the story of how flexible concrete was created fast forward from ancient Rome to the Palace of Versailles in 19th century bronze gardener Joseph money builds big strong concrete pots to plant trees in only there's a hit trees grow and expand that concrete is widget money a needed to create concrete that could stand up to the power of plus I've come to meet engineer Garret Hughes to find out how he did it gasps for the best way then to understand what concrete is is to make some saw bra a wheelbarrow and a shovel so what he need a basic ratio would be three coarse aggregate to sand and one shuttle of cement that's what gives you strength finally you need water to bind it all to get that basic content then what's wrong with it I mean it is immensely strong surely it is strong for any in certain applications for example if someone's to squash it or put it under compression that it's very strong that resists that force for quite a while but if people start something that was going to be in the middle say a lot heavy load in the center of it it could Bend it could be in tension and it's not very strong under those circumstances it's quite brittle and it probably snap so like any material and it can be very strong in one way in this instance you can't squash it yeah but to try and bending that is weak and that's the problem with ordinary concrete the concrete in the trot needs to be able to give to withstand the constant pounding from big waves Gareth wants to show what would happen if it were built of ordinary concrete first we have to build our own concrete texture we no ordinary concrete is very strongly to try to compress or smooth we're going to see whether it will bet in other words what tension does Gareth has prepared a huge slab of concrete 20 centimeters thick and weighing nearly five times you think this would be incredibly strong let's see I'm going to drop a small 32 kilogram weight just three meters the equivalent of a 4 meter wave hitting the Tollan flat to the troll were made of something like this it would stand secure you would have thought concrete of that thickness would be pretty strong and now I did and it is it's just that it's only strong in certain ways it does have weaknesses I can't believe that broken and this was Joseph Monet's problem back in 19th century France he found the pots cracked as the tree was new expanded on EA's solution was to add a reinforcing material that could Bend and stretch and make up for the shortcomings of concrete in his day he used iron today we use steel but it's exactly the same theory and it's beautiful timber to me [Music] just pour concrete around a steel frame reinforcement let's the concrete Bend and concrete protect the steel from the elements this flap in the back same size the one we just broke it's still 20 centimeters clearly differences that it's been reinforced in 26 steel rods to test it we're not going to mess around with the kind of weight I can that's the slam that broke fashioned way a bit because we can't drop a 510 skin this will be 50 times the load of the earlier test but we'll some thin rods of reinforcing steel really stop this slab from brink technically this should work if it's dust could it's holding there [Music] the only difference between that slab and the one that broke and as few bits of reinforcing steel this is the gauge as feel of these to reinforce that slab and this is the gauge of Steel they use to reinforce the concrete on the trolley a plan that's going to be tough as money a fad you don't need much steel to make it effective but because trolley is so huge there's still enough steel for 15 I fall towers the rest of the structure consists of relatively cheap concrete enough to build two-and-a-half Wendling standards not even the biggest waves can threaten troll man but the rig also needs to be watertight the hollow troll gas platform extends all the way to the seabed nearly 1/3 of a kilometer and lower way with 2/3 of the structure underwater engineers needed to ensure the storm exceeds stayed on the outside of the troll yep that is quite a drop and if the view isn't enough to tell you all you need to know about how big these legs actually are the fact that it's a 9 minute elevator ride to get down to the bottom I get a job I'm in nine minutes oh it meant to do that it always does I'm in admit to get the bobbin how far in it the elevator travels down inside one of the trolls legs right down to the seabed I'm at the bottom of one of Tralee legs who's supposed to be very deep indeed that feeling that I can see way up there isn't the top of the leg but that's barely a third of the way up is nearly three times further than that at the top and that puts me on a level with the seabed and the incredible water pressure down here doesn't just mean that these walls have to be immensely strong they've also got to be watertight the external pressure is around 35 kilos per square centimeter at the base of the platform over 300 metres below the waist and even this two meter thick concrete could fail catastrophically if there were any weaknesses so the question is how do you make your quite constructed in lots of different sections it's very difficult to make it waterproof where the sections are joined together but I mean found a way to make a building in a single piece totally waterproof with no leaks or gaps it's amazing but even a brief pausing construction would leave a theme it could be a lethal weakness on the troll and the secret of building tall structures without ever stopping is to pour the concrete continuously you need a mold that moves up the building as it grows sike concrete is pork then hydraulics anchored in the concrete structure itself raised the mold or shutter a few centimeters so that the pouring can start all over again underneath the rig this is the shutter that contains the concrete has been poured the bit that they lift up this is the fresh concrete that's been exposed are these in fact we're moving now look there you go that's me everything I'm standing on everybody on top we're all moving up to expose fresh concrete underneath the process is called slip forming hydraulics move the mold up the building without any scaffolding but bill it's still wet just not that yet it is amazing to think that they're still working above here if pouring new concrete at the moment this is all just wet stuff that just been poured in from the wheelbarrows it's just no we're going off here still soft and down here as the chemical reactions taking place by which the concrete cures it's warm this building grows by 20 centimeters an hour it took six weeks to build the 180 meter to slip forming is the quickest way of building huge concrete structures but even with ultra fast clip forming it still took almost a year to build the trolls mighty legs seamless concrete meant the platform could resist the crushing pressures of deceit decks but control still faces an unseen danger hidden in its very structure the troll gas platform was built to withstand the huge stresses generated by 30 meter waves and gale force winds but it faces another kind of strength that could be equally devastating something as simple as a musical note threatens potential catastrophe it all starts with every structural engineers 90 the collapse of the mighty Tacoma Narrows Bridge in the USA the suspension bridge in Washington State is designed to be a revolutionary construction engineered use massive 43 centimeters steel cable to carry the country on July 1st 1940 they celebrated the completion of the third bigot suspension bridge in the world with a sense of spat 850 metres wide [Applause] but local residents notice the bridge had a quirk even moderate winds caused it to bounce up and down they got used to Carl disappearing from sight as the bridge rose and fell and nicknamed it galloping gertie but then four months after it opened stunned onlookers saw the rigid steel and concrete twisting and the edge is rose and fell up to eight in the party the confident project engineer strode onto the bridge to Ludington stealth but the twisting got more and more violent remarkably the structure survive the extreme stresses for almost an child before they became over with amazingly the only fatality was a dog the problem was caused by a phenomenon called resonance the trolleys engineers faced an equally dangerous threat when it's subjected to the wrong kind of stress it even super-strong concrete can fall apart and because it's located out here in the hostile North Sea the troll a platform is vulnerable to a particular kind of stress that's repeated over and over again ways over 70 years the platform could be hit by more than 180 million ways I've done the math but it's not the size of the wave that could spell disaster it's their rhythm I've discovered that roll is a kind of huge musical issue which makes it particularly vulnerable to repeated stresses like lapping waves I'm here with sound engineer Jonathan Hargreaves to find out Seoul's hidden danger all physical structures have a particular note they like to resonate out they will ring out with the wineglass that's particularly audible and if I just ping it the vibration the glass vibrates the air which we hear a sound all objects have these nodes yes they have the note some are more audible than others so even the troll has its own note a frequency at which it resonates scientists calculate that frequency by Counting the number of vibrations per second the glass vibrates nearly 500 times a second and this frequency is its fatal flaw so that King King yeah is important because that's that's a constant now yes a physical property of the actual object how does that help us with breaking it what we're going to do is we're going to turn the process by which we hear the note backwards so instead of the structure of our bridge and we hear the note we can actually call the vibration through the air and that will make the structure of our berated sympathy if you produce exactly the right notes with the guitar that matches the note of the glass then the glass will resonate that means if you replay the exact same note that the glass produces you can make it vibrate in sympathy without even touching it's called resonance eventually the glass will vibrate so much that it will shatter so little is as simple as that this has a note it's a frequency which it likes to vibrate if we reverse the process if we send the same vibrations back to it yeah it'll just vibrate in sympathy with yes the until he gets carried away right so we need to match this to that exactly - they're both singing the same line exactly right it sounds spookily simple I don't believe it to produce the lethal note for the glass we tuned the guitar to the exact same note the glass itself produced [Music] [Music] [Laughter] slow-motion footage shows the glass wobbling like jello until it can take the residents no longer now as far as we know that's never been done with a guitar before but the principle is exactly the same as the cartoon soprano opera singer and the glass breaking the point now is what's the connection between that and trolley being shaken to bits by resonance could be a lethal threat even to a structure as big as the troll gas plant it's 300-meter legs are like huge guitar strings certain sequences of waves could set them vibrating along their entire length and just like it's love if they resonate too much at a critical frequency they could be shaken too big more than half a century after the collapse of the Tacoma bridge tolls engineers took the problem very serious I heard it from the boss himself yawn huger swords need innovative form of resonance is sitting waiting for a monster 200-foot way and the problem was not the largest waves that was if you have waves in a certain highest and certain direction and certain frequency could put some forces on the pattern that it could easily break like a swing if you have the right period and the right force and the right frequency you can make it swing in vibrate it is the biggest way that it's at the time in the interval mumbling like how bad could it they have bigger problems in rows case it could collapse the whole construction that would send the 16 billion dollar trolley to the bottom of this scene the engineered learn better from the jacoba creature trolls engineered had to stop the structure from resonating at the critical frequency generated by a sequence of waves back in the music studio Jonathan shows me how to take the resonant frequency out of the danger zone so this principle of changing the frequency is pretty easy to understand because it can play a note on a guitar that's string and then on the same string changing the net yes what you've done if you've changed the length of the string that's vibrating and by doing that you've changed what note it wants to resonate at and instead of hearing a low tone we hear a high tone so you've changed the frequency yeah and how can we apply that then to the glass what we do is that the tone through the glass so if you just hit it it stuff it yeah that was the resident note yeah I just dumped that you do it again it's changed it completely can we see if it will ask these topic breaking so if we set it up exactly as we did before if I played the note of the glass on the guitar what the girls ready shot [Music] patrol engineer's used the exact same principle without sense they retune the planet by shortening the length of the leg that could vibrate their version of the pencil was a huge lump of concrete halfway up the length they fitted a special brace to stiffen the structure it was just like holding down a guitar string further up the neck to get a higher note now rolled legs vibrate at a higher frequency waves can't hit the next at a person attempt to trigger faking residents and after the Tacoma fridge ten years after its unfortunate collapse engineers built a replacement with a modified design using stiffening strips nicknamed sturdy Gert in memory of it's unfortunate predecessor it's still stamped with the troll platform braced against wave renders the engineer's moved on to their next challenge now they had to fix it to the seed bank and that's where the invention of the airport some three hundred and fifty years ago comes in the troll gas platform is one of the tallest structures on the planet rising over 450 meters engineers constructed it over 300 kilometres away from the gas field where it now stands they built the legs and the main platform separately to join them they build the 300 meter hollow legs with water sinking them almost completely this was the most perilous moment in trolls liar with the legs now facing a water pressure of 380 tons per square root another platform this light had collapsed under the pressure at this same point just five years before it triggered an earthquake measuring 3.0 on the Richter scale but trolls legs held fast they floated the platform over the legs with Justin metres then engineers slowly pumped water out of the legs raising them up to the platform centimeter by centimeter and day later the six hundred and fifty six thousand ton structure was completed now the entire rig had to be raped to clear reach that they between the pure and the gasping until 10 tonnes to ease the half-submerged troll through the narrow pubes [Music] it became the largest object ever moved across the face of the earth by humans but it still had to be fixed to the seafloor over 300 meters below the waves [Music] ballasted with water troll weighs more than a million tons but that still isn't enough to securing to the seabed this is where the invention of the air pot some 350 years ago comes in in 1654 a German inventor showed off his new air pump with a demonstration of the incredible power of well nothing physicist Toby for AC sets out to recreate the experiment for me this is one of the most famous experiments in the world absolutely I'm not being rude I just expected to see something a bit more obviously scientific it's very simple if you hemispheres made of solid steel it looks like cookware yeah basically there's no mechanical boots inside no no no no no they've been great for ratatouille inventor otto von Gierke wanted to test the role of air in breathing and burning so he set out to create a vacuum and invented the air pump to show the Emperor of Germany how well his new pump worked he started by sucking the air out of the sphere let me delete just three parts yeah every part is crucial and then I have to shine get the top piece on there we go and then crucial part of the experiment the vacuum pump all it does is suck air so that's what makes our vacuum in exact plan it on and now we're sucking so this is what's fixing these two hemispheres together that young yeah now in there that's left there in there than there is open to replicate on garriga's experiment we need one other ingredient horses three two one pull but we haven't gotten we do have footmen and they're here to help me prove that nothing is stronger than a football team but only if nothing is in the right place come on guys give us a lead on Garrigan set two teams of horses to try to pull the hemispheres apart and that's what these football players are going to attempt right I think that should be about ready okay so that's cool yeah there really is nothing in we need some flowstone right can I have the strongmen please over here time to be strong come on chaps okay let's have two on that side two on that side first of all I think we'll ramp this up stone so if you take the strain okay when we're ready hmm pull give it everything you've got boys there's nothing in this is held together just by the vacuum that we carry on look at this place is on hello boys one more let's get Abbas come on give it to me there's nothing in there I let the last few humble everybody on their break for now they're getting serious oh come on you know what's in that sphere nothing I mean look at the sky this close here oh that's a clean land a big strong man and you've been beaten by nothing it's true there is nothing inside the sphere but because air is a gas it flows all around the outside of the sphere creating almost 1 kilo per square centimeter of pressure against the two hearts and pushing them tightly together that's like holding 70 kilograms of weight in the palm of your hand the only thing that's holding those together is the pressure difference you have no air inside that sphere and you have lots of air outside so the pressure difference is huge so this is all dependent on pressure difference it wasn't actually matter what the absolutes are at either end but there's more pressure outside and there is inside come on that give it on garriga's 16 horses couldn't manage either okay guys right you can slack it off now your time is up you have been beat let's just get on the end of this thing never look because I just want to do something here if you're ready it was easy one tiny bloke did it when you lot fail and that is the power of a vacuum and that's how you keep the trolley gas platform pinned to the sea floor by using nothing at all [Music] my research shows me that trolley designers used a 21st century version of von Guericke hemisphere to secure the rig to the ocean floor they did it by fixing a series of suction plants to the bottom of the trolley here is my model of the suction piles obviously the real things got a lot bigger than this about 40 times the lens but this is how they work essentially just like an elongated cup open at this end and then at the top the sealed end an essential piece of kit there is a tap and that's what makes it all possible and here's how it works here's my recreation of the seabed it's a sort of goopy glue a mess in texture pretty much what it's like so if we put it in with the tap close so this is just like a cup the big pile gets lowered and very very quickly becomes very hard to push down at all because know what's happening obviously it's sealed and it's compressing the air in the top of the pile and there's a lot of air in there to compress and it'll only go so far and then when it's gone in when it's all wobbly it's sitting on a bed of compressed air have we open the tap on the top suddenly the air can escape it's not sealed it just pushes you neatly down into the seabed if we close that tap it's sealed again so it's rock-solid and steady and in fact it won't come back because what you're doing you've created a pressure difference you know what I'm actually doing now is lifting the seabed out where you can see some of the seabed coming out there I can't move it at all it's become part of the seabed open the tap [Music] it can come straight out that's exactly how it works only bigger trolls 19 suction piles stand over 35 meters high and a fully driven into the seabed not even 30 meter waves and hurricane force winds can ship all that remains now is to get at the bottom of what chale was designed for and the answer to that is right there these are the pipes bringing the gas to the surface so how do you get the gas out of the ground and back to normal that we're a racing car can help [Music] when the trolly gas platform first drilled down beneath the North Sea ten years ago it tapped into a gas reserve which poured out under its own pressure the gas surged up to the surface and 270 kilometers of pipe back to the main but after 10 years gas pressure was poor this bottle represents the gas bill and inside the fizzy drink is the gas now obviously when they drill into this for real it's under enormous pressure and there is a way of getting pressure in here straightaway by using this inside the cap these ordinary sweet glued to the inside of the lid when I drill through will drop into this and I'll cause it to release all of the carbon dioxide from inside in one hit putting it under immense pressure obviously I'm not suggesting there are enormous sweets suspended underneath the surface of the scene that's just to illustrate pressure so we fixed the cap on it's probably best if you don't try this at home though clearly that's how we discovered it worked I shall now commence drilling into my gas field I've got a good idea what's going to happen so he probably but there's an illustrative drilling we hit the gas field and as he comes [Music] except for awhile everything's very easy it does the work itself the gas just comes flooding out but after a while inevitably the pressure is all equalized that's at the same pressure in there as out here it's not going to come out anymore it becomes a bit trickier the only solution to that is you have to suck it out which is a fairly tasty alternative in this instance but for real it's complicated time-consuming and expensive engineer is needed a solution and it came in the shape of an antique car the 1902 paris to vienna carvings helped stall engineer's blast gas back to Norway one driver Marcel Renard modified his account and carries himself to fix in secret lasting more air into the engine he invents the turbocharger this is a much faster car than master runners but it's got a turbocharger the uses exactly the same principle he pioneered in 1902 this turbo makes the most gorgeous noise what Marcel run every gap has been taken to extremes but it still essentially the same box trick as motoring expert gray and may explains turbo charges whatever to fan it's a little compressor an engine works on air and petrol the objects knowledge makes it go bang for Agatha power but we add a compressor and we can force more air in the engine and it goes bang even more and this is the real one isn't battery the internals of that so there's one in there and that tiny little fan spinning away that makes all the difference to an engine this big and complex this clever little fan can blast enough air into the engine to almost double that's exactly the same principle plus all Rena thought hello if you use it there it'll get more in will get more out correct and it's all down to that is simpler Cyprus but how does Renner's souped-up engine helped rock get gas out of the ground important thing to know about fats when they blow they also suck on one side you feel a breeze but on the other side is a pressure voice sucking air in troll uses fans to suck the gas from the earth through these points these are the Giants RT connected to its beating heart it's turbos a fan is not a complicated thing they all create a flow of gas or air there's a fan here and everybody's working away you can see it to the Dare where you can see the work that it's doing because I can ask it to lift something before they can hold that up no problem but all fans obviously have a limit to how much work they can do my taxes 1 by RP is to lift something heavier well I'll see what happens it's just a bag of flour no steak sound like a flower way arbequina stands on Saleh 900 of those a spectacular [Music] and they need to be powerful the fans have to blow the gas all the way from here along these huge pipes to Norway and it only takes 84 seconds that almost three thousand kilometers an hour but that's all just numbers how much power is that really well as I can't wait to find out this is a vertical winter when the prop fires up it shifts exactly the same amount of gas as the troughs fast have love within this me [Music] how bout a big one 65 kilo 10 starvation but now all of a sudden link so long I have this is the same colleague is the band onboard the platform every second tolls fans move more than a shunt of gas and it stems from Marcel Renault and his turbocharged car nearly every part of trolls amazing design has been created to help those giant fans do their job pumping billions of cubic meters of gas on their way to 18 million users in mainland Europe somewhere over the horizon man 20 years ago no one has built a platform on this scale before troll is a genuine marvel of modern engineering deep in its DNA are some startling connections a plant top made it flexible a grain elevator made it water a pump fix it to the seafloor a musical note made it resistant to the lapping waves and a turbocharger blasted the gas to know it's simple really if you have the right connections

Channel: ISS SRPS

Views: 105,083

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Id: G96cjsFQ0cs

Length: 42min 40sec (2560 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2017