Installation machinery

---

The key to low cost guideways that are cheaper than maintaining streets and highways and rural roads is fully automated verticle ly integrated guideway production and installation industries.  These need to pay off their component purchase costs and become self managed user service industries that build guideways at property owners requests with few to no people involved as labor or management overhead.  This is how the guideways can be put in for almost no cost a half a decade after each machinery set self debt retires against line use charges on the guideways that set builds.

The guideway designs has to be developed for fully automated manufacturing.  Simplifying fabrication and assembly complexity Is important.

Ever more permanently sustainable automation will eliminate easy knowledge low personal asset jobs while raising the cost of living in ever greater technology expectation cultures.  People use to comforts, good food and assisted tasks are not often going to happily go struggling native when they see others living in luxuries.  We need to create abundant forever more sustainable human economlies that will require a nonprofit base robotic economy.  PRT has always been robotic transportation.  The global guideway can not forever owe debt to a few morally deranged dictatorial investors.

Doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, stock brokers and others in wealthier classes already are facing demonstrated automated systems replacements.  This leaves only management manipulators who would steer us towards a new aristocracy or dictatorship and wars defending economic power territories.

We need to create user controlled, beneficial, global robotic systems that automatically manage, self finance and produce, but mostly distribute at low overhead, the food, clothing and shelter for large numbers of jobless landless people.  Self managed user controled robotic industries can provide free services and products.

Putting impoverished people out in the cold creates crime and conflicts in economies where their cost of living represents a still small, but growing fraction now supported by taxes.  Some wealthier to middle class people can come to resent tax supported wealfare recipients even though they comprise a lower cost to personal budgets than the profit based costs of the wealthy.

Lowering the cost of the guideways allows robotic, mostly self managed and sustaining global necessity producinghuman and robotic industries to supply people’s needs world wide, both people who can pay for them in part and ones who can not pay.

The real challenge is to try and integrate poor people back into the productive economy in some fashion that does not require talents or desires they will never be able to absorb.  Convincing poorer people to not reproduce dependents raised into their low expectation energy culture and habits that do not integrate well Into the more active society.

To create low cost globally assisted food and shelter we need even today low cost guideways for which we need to create mass produced low cost guideway installation machinery.

There are many ways to place a guideway pier, attach a off set hanger, and attach a span to it, automaticly adjust everything for near perfect alignment then move forward a couple of minutes later to place the next 100 foot long span.

As any automated production line goes this is about as complex as it gets because advancing arms need to act as autonomous arborist skillfully trimming tree limbs in the way of advancement all with property owner detailed oversight.

Power lines that are in the path way might be supported off the spans above or below the clearance pathways by an insulated sleeve spreader.  To move a through the span power line two arms need to grab each end shorting them across a machine conductor while cutting them for uninterrupted electric service and a insulated wire through span extension is the placed and spliced into the circuits.

Moveable A-frame multipule extension legs can give support for off center loads when laying in curved sections, but can not damage properties and buildings they rest against or set on.

To supply each guideway installation system nearby assembly factories mobility follow taking  compact nested pars and putting them together into wide high and long spans.  The piers might be brought nested but made to final dimensions at distant factories.

proposed is a dual running gear transportation system that brings formed materials to the front under the guideways but returns them over the top or vice versa.  The slower top running gear might be further away transfered to bottom return trips when outside of construction congestion.  The bulkier high speed running gear might transfer loads to top running gear after the mobile assembly factory site to be returned on cuirculation fast bottom running gear.  Many choices few certainties.

There are hundreds to thousands of ways to design all of these features.  The first demonstration experiments will be expensive and probably tried for DARPA like prize money or first contract status in limited funded run off competitions.  Low bidder probably will also prevail.

To facilitate assembly, proposed is a cut and auto weld together full strength splice joint plus the self regulating auto expansion joints that allow PRT through cantilever or continous span expansion control joints.  These need to have stepped expansion to keep the gear track rail in correct pitch without inducing slippage wear in the wheels and rails.

To ramp up to about five million miles of guideway placed a year will require about 2,000 sets of production machinery with hundreds of repetitive parts on each robotic fabrication and assembly line.  Proposed is each designed installation set takes alignment advisecand consent from property owners who will need to sign off on plans developed mutually at one time with their neighbors before the guideway can be placed.  Drone alignment survey systems might allow visualization of pathways and pier placements to assist in mutually preestablishing best shared alignments.

The cost of moving acguideway is lower than the original cost consisting of a set of tracked running gear A-frames dropped from the guideway to pick up whole blocks progressively at a time and moving it over.

pier depth will will vary depending on harness in the soils and worst case seasonal rail and frost penetration depths.  As described in pier design possibility larger or wider under ground stake bases will be used where possible.  It might be prefered to have bases that screw in or have cut and weld attachments to the upper pier sections so it would not be necessasary elevate a moved alignment just slide it sideways.

several TIG leading MIG welding processes are proposed here to speed up rewearing beveled cuts using spark shielded collars to prevent grass fires from starting.

Fire suppression systems are proposed as part of every guideway vehicle as well as using the pier placement water lubricant supply as a fire supresent system.  Water is needed as a coolant, lubricant, leakage property non-contaminating hydraulic fluid and fire suppressant, as well as available to water plants and grass to reduce fire susceptibility.  Proposed is insulated winter heated on vehicle and machine storage tanks with internal high pressure electric submerged pumps.

Guidewat installation is more like pipeline installation than road or railroad construction without requiring any earth moving ever.  Automating the complex tasks that skilled humans carry out in management and worker teams is proposed to be simplified by structural design features that are adaptable to a wide range of situations using the fewest custom or specialized parts inventory.  Waiting on a not anticipated part might mean that advancement is held up a great expense in lost progress.  The existing standard parts need to be on the spot cut and reused to fit any possible situation with the lest threaded assembly cost.  Today bolts are used everywhere for assembly because welding and cutting takes longer with contraction and other thermal control problems.  Proposed is insulating joints and faster TIG leading MIG all position slot welding proceeding with machine visual adjustment of in progress welds.  Flaws might be double pass corrected rather than recur and rewelded to save cooking time.  Mist or nitrogen concentrated gas temperature control might be used to prevent heat damage to adjacent actuator or sender modal parts.

While it is conjectured that computer designs or invention might take over creative design tasks this is unlikely due to the problems that occur in acceptance and adaptability to variables requiring social functions possibly too complex for computer learning outside of being designed in or software programmed leading to inflexibility.  The same might be said for corporate mentalities in humans.

Computers might do better at adaptive management and design tasks and eventually mediating best choices based on preprogrammed criteria.  From the observers stand point this will look like creativity much as engineers imagine themselves to be creative artists when they only use preestablished options from their training tool kits, options created over time by the inventions collected together from countless other developers and researchers whose contributions will be remembered by few people who use them.

Just as with the PRT vehicles themselves the guideway installation machinery has to have sensors that detect positions and relationships with surrounding objects and people more like the complexity of autonomus road vehicles than the simpler task relationships of PRT operation in their safe zone operating space created by the guideway placement alignment choices.

multipule redundency is difficult in machine fabrication operations.  For instance welds might have three rotating heads for three simaltainious welds.  If one fails before releasing the clamping it might be redone by one of the remaining working heads untill the broken head can be removed and replaced by one of many spare heads.  How do locate all of these parts in close proximity remains uncertain as there are so many choices to make.

proposed is using pre heated nitrogen weld shielding gas in closed sliver environments to reduce the Oxygen concentration around the CO2 argon cup gas mix which is more difficult to portably generate.  This is to reduce the quantity of the more expensive gasses as oxygen concentrates can cheaply on the spot make 95% purer nitrogen and oxygen used with spot made electrolytic hydrogen for cutting and possibly for preheating in place of a TIG pre heat to speed up welding rates.

thermite sleeve welding as well as protrusion resistance welding has been looked at.  No conclusions about what might be best as this has so far been a one person project.