3 ms·
Spray it with water?
by mirekrusin 4y ago
Spray it with water?
- dragonwriter 4y agoflooding the runway would temporarily deal with the heat but also render it unusable for a different reason.
- skykooler 4y agoWhy? Airplanes are able to land in the rain.
- pixl97 4y agoCools the runway but can make the local atmosphere more dangerous for humans.
- lm28469 4y agoYou'd need to design a system and make it pass all sort of tests and specifications. It's not as easy as bringing two firetrucks and spraying for 10 minutes. When mistakes end in potential dead people they don't DIY solutions
- mcguire 4y agoBack of the envelope calculation: Yuma International (discussed above) has 540,000m^2 of runways. Assume a depth of 0.1m of cooling, that is 54,000m^3. The density of asphalt is 2322kg/m^3, so we have 310^9kg. The specific heat of asphalt is 900 J/kgK, so that'd be 310^12J to get rid of 1 K degree. The specific heat of water is 4184J/kgC. If I assume the water goes from nearly freezing to nearly boiling and have my algebra right, that's about 6,000,000kg of water or about 6000m^3 of water, all to lower the asphalt by 1 degree. That's about 2.5 standard bulk units of water (Olympic swimming pools). By comparison, 2.5cm of rain on the same runway area is about 13,500m^3 (?) of water. I think it's doable. Anybody got some spare garden hoses? :-)
- mcguire 4y agoFormatting. Sigh.