Today on "impossible engineering"...
The Halley VI research station,
the most advanced polar-built
research facility on the planet...
We have this fabulous station
that enables us to operate in a year-round way.
...Located in the world's harshest
continent... Antarctica.
We are actually just coming to a bit of a sticky spot.
It took revolutionary engineering
and help from the innovative pioneers of the past...
What a machine! It is amazing! Whoo!
...to make the impossible possible.
... Captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com
captions paid for by discovery communications
Antarctica...
Planet earth's final frontier.
Surrounded by the Southern ocean,
covering five million square miles,
its mass of ice
makes up more than half of the planet's fresh water.
For 60 years,
the British antarctic survey has carried out
groundbreaking scientific research
in this hostile environment.
And it's a workplace that engineer Chris Martin
must brace for every day.
At the end of the day, you are here on your own.
It could be minus 50 and blowing about 50 knots as well.
Station leader Jessica Walkup
must prepare the team
for the most extreme winter storms on the planet,
and the floating ice shelf beneath them
constantly threatens their efforts.
You could have breakages of the ice shelf,
meaning that you could be marooned on an iceberg.
Since the original Halley station
was built in 1956,
all five bases have succumbed
to these remorseless conditions.
After a few seasons, the weight of snow and ice
on top of them actually crush them and made them unusable.
To withstand the planet's harshest environment,
engineers develop Halley VI.
It may look like
the space stations of science fiction,
but this is, in fact, the world's
most cutting-edge ice station.
Located in Antarctica on the brunt ice shelf,
this 16,000-square-foot modular structure
is made up of eight prefabricated units.
Two bedroom pods sleep up to 52 people,
the social module contains a kitchen, dining room,
and a fully equipped gym.
To protect its occupants,
expandable hydraulic legs neutralize snow drifts
while 13-foot-long skis allow the 110-ton structures
to be towed across the ice,
making it Antarctica's
first relocatable research facility.
But before its designers
can even contemplate construction,
they must face a seemingly impossible problem.
The biggest challenge, I think, on the brunt ice shelf
is the isolation.
You have to be able to
ship down every nut and bolt down
to the very last thing that will be needed.
To bring in those vital supplies,
captain John Harper
must navigate through 3,000 nautical miles of ice fields.
Antarctica is a difficult place to get to.
Conventional ships would get damaged very easily in the ice.
They're not designed to hit anything apart from water,
so it would very easily become damaged
and would not last for very long.
So, how do you complete a journey
across a seemingly impenetrable sea?
This would have been impossible
without one of history's most brilliant innovators.
Throughout time, ice has often been about having fun.
Ta-da! Yay!
5,000 years ago, Scandinavians
strapped animal bones
to their feet to skate around their frozen lakes.
During the early 1900s,
ice was used to race by any means...
Hey, watch it, ya bum!
...while saw-driven ice harvesters
help develop luxurious tastes.
No, I wanted strawberry.
But despite its appeal,
getting a ship through the ice was a major problem...
Honey, I'm home! What?
...and engineers had to think outside the box.
Oh, darling.
Dr. Rhys Morgan is riding the river Elbe in Hamburg, Germany.
Further north than continental America,
Hamburg's fresh water often freezes over in winter.
In 1871, the harbor froze over...
not just for days, not even for weeks,
but for months.
Shipping came to a complete standstill,
and businesses were soon facing bankruptcy.
The residents of Hamburg were so worried
that they came out in gangs
with pick-axes and shovels
to try and break through the ice,
but it made no difference.
Local engineer Carl Ferdinand Steinhaus
began looking for a solution.
Focusing on the ships themselves,
he recognized their shape was the problem.
Imagine this sharp, pointed edge of my sledgehammer
is the bow of my boat.
It's perfect for cutting through the water and the waves.
But let's see what happens
when it encounters the ice.
It didn't cleave its way through the ice.
But Steinhaus realized that approaching the ice
from a different angle produced a much better result.
Wow!
That was amazing.
And coming from above makes a big difference.
So Steinhaus set out to create a spoon-shaped hull
that could crash down on the ice.
The wider, shallow bow allowed a ship
to slide up the edge of the ice
before gravity forced it down on top.
The ship's weight produced a huge sheering force
and reduced the ice's resistance.
To test it, engineers tow a scaled model
with Steinhaus' spoon-shaped bow
at around 3 1/2 miles per hour,
simulating an ice breaker's speed.
The model's filled with instrumentation
so they can see exactly what's happening,
how the hull design is breaking up the ice.
With the ratio, the ice it's cutting through
is approximately 3 feet thick.
In 1871, Steinhaus launched icebreaker I into the seas.
Its spoon-shaped bow design paved the way for vessels
to reach the planet's most inaccessible locations.
To get to Halley VI in Antarctica,
captain John Harper and his crew sail
a Steinhaus-inspired engineering colossus...
the Ernest Shackleton.
This 260-foot marvel tackles
thousands of miles of frozen water
in the treacherous Weddell sea.
We are actually just coming to a bit of a sticky spot.
I was gonna head down there to those pools,
but it's gonna be a bit crashing and banging.
The rounded bow of this 440-ton ship
undulates over the ice.
But to avoid any ripping,
its polar-grade steel hull is streamlined
without stabilizer fins.
A reinforced steel band known as the ice belt
runs down its length
to avoid crushing from built-up ice.
But these are extreme conditions.
The bit that we are about to go through
is probably 2- to 3-feet thick.
Power is also key.
To keep the ice at bay,
2 diesel engines produce 7,200 shaft horsepower.
So, the secret is, is to actually
just keep the ship moving,
and that's why you're continually looking
for the right way to go.
But as its challenging voyage draws to a close,
thrusters allow the Shackleton to do something extraordinary.
Maneuvering the shaped bow,
it carves an edge in the ice
creating a usable pontoon ready to unload.
However, reaching Antarctica is just the beginning.
To create the region's
most technically advanced research station,
the Halley VI team must draw
on the inspirational pioneers of the past...
Whoa-ho. These fibers... they're so cool.
...To create more impossible engineering.
Halley VI...
the most advanced research station
ever built in the polar regions.
Engineered by Aecom, scientists and support staff
operate this modular structure, which incorporates
a meteorological observatory, four laboratories,
and an air-traffic-control facility.
But constructing this ambitious project
poses significant problems.
Not only must every piece of equipment be imported,
Halley VI's designers
must build it during the short summer window
before Antarctica's brutal conditions return.
The seasons here are very short.
We're looking at 12 weeks maximum, really,
between when you can start getting equipment
and people onto site to start building.
And with eight modules to complete,
including a 5,100-square-foot central pod,
British antarctic survey engineer Chris Martin
must help take on something daunting...
navigating materials from the ships to Halley VI.
The largest piece of infrastructure
had to be transportable.
Our existing sleds had to be able to carry everything.
So how do you build
such a technically advanced stricture
at lightning speed
in the world's most inhospitable environment?
Achieving this would have been impossible
without another great innovator from the past.
When it comes to building,
humanity has often been in a hurry.
Me finished.
Nomadic Mongolians erected their yurts
in an instant using concertina and wood.
They were so speedy to put together...
Hello? Can I borrow some sugar?
...even Genghis Khan was a fan.
Invading England, William the conqueror
relied on building lots of castles very quickly.
Legend has it he even
brought them readymade on his ships.
Steady, steady!
But only during the 20th century did humanity master building
at truly break-neck speed.
Oh, Harold.
Dr. Rhys Morgan is exploring Letchworth, north of London.
It's the unlikely home of a technique
that revolutionized domestic construction.
It might look like a sleepy English town
with its well-kept gardens and neat and trimmed hedges,
but actually, this place was a radical experiment.
In 1905, a competition was launched
to build a house in the countryside
for just $185
in order to help low-paid agricultural workers.
One of the major costs of building houses is time.
Traditionally in Britain, houses are built using bricks
on a layer-by-layer basis.
But the costs associated with this time
meant that prices of houses in the country
were way beyond the reach of the average farm worker.
To solve this housing crisis
meant building at an unprecedented pace.
This house is revolutionary.
Not just that its looks...
the main part of this house
just took 36 hours to build.
This design was the brainchild
of English engineer John Brodie
who did away with traditional masonry techniques
to build at lightning speed.
The secret of Brodie's success
was his inspired use of steel-reinforced concrete.
He used pre-manufactured panels,
which were both inexpensive to fabricate
and quick to install.
Here in one of the bedrooms...
this ceiling, the roof in actual fact,
is a single slab of solid concrete
brought down on to the walls at an angle.
As we look at the top,
we can just make out the tie-rods.
These were the bolts that pulled the walls together
and made the whole structure sound.
It's just brilliant.
To build Halley VI,
engineers are drawing on Brodie's
revolutionary prefabrication methods.
Shipping the entire station
to Antarctica involves huge quantities of components.
But as British antarctic survey's
engineer Chris Martin reveals,
this first stage of construction starts
10,000 miles away.
The trial erection's carried out in South Africa
to make sure everything went together,
'cause it's quite important to make sure
that we have a viable concept before we arrive here.
470 crane lifts unload around
10,000 cubic tons of material
before they're organized and transported on giant sleds.
Once delivered, they form an astonishing
2 1/2-mile-long line of parts.
With just a three-month weather window,
the construction team must build and fast.
Structural adviser Ben Rowe
is working to support the station's heart...
the 1,800-square-foot lab.
The steelwork that you see around you is a space frame,
which is like the chassis in a car.
It provides the strength
for the support of the floors and the structure above.
But importantly, it connects the four legs
in this particular module together.
As temporary supports are removed,
it takes less than one hour to raise each frame up
on its 13-foot-long legs,
then specific interiors can be installed.
As you can see, there's the prefabricated bedrooms,
plant room, and W.C.
The next stage for this
is the structural steelwork erected around it.
Cranes lift each superstructure into place.
Take it down, mark.
Take him down to about 10 1/2,
see how it sits, okay?
Once lowered, a typical pod
is ready for its critical outer skin.
But with brutal winter snowstorms
and temperatures as low as minus 58 degrees,
engineers must use a material that's both lightweight
and which can withstand Antarctica's brutal climate.
To do this, Halley VI's engineers
must turn to a breakthrough invention from the past.
You can see
that as the glass comes through those holes,
it makes these incredibly fine fibers.
It's beautiful.
To make the impossible possible.
In Antarctica, Halley VI
is the most technically advanced research station
ever built in the polar regions.
But to create a lightweight material capable of withstanding
Antarctica's hostile environment,
engineers must turn to
a breakthrough innovation of the past.
Physicist Andrew Steele is
at Sheffield university in England.
At the glass laboratory, he's tracking down
one of history's great breakthrough materials.
Some of the most important
and fundamental discoveries
have been made completely by accident.
But from penicillin to Teflon,
they've nonetheless gone on to revolutionize
the way that we live our lives.
In 1932, there was just such a discovery.
In Illinois, under the guidance
of engineer Russell Games Slayter,
researcher Dale Kleist had been
applying molten glass through a spray gun
testing its suitability as an adhesive
when he stumbled on to something extraordinary.
So, this metal sheet represents the nozzles in Kleist's gun.
That's the molten glass, and we're gonna catch the results
in this bucket of cold water.
Whoa!
You can see that
as the glass comes through those holes,
it makes these incredibly fine fibers.
It's beautiful.
Once cooled in the cold water,
the glass takes an unusual form.
And here we go...
you can see we've made some primitive glass fibers.
This process was the first step on the road to the material
that we know these days as fiberglass.
Further developed into fine, single fibers,
this revolutionary material has a surprising quality.
You wouldn't think these things
would be strong at all,
and yet even with this relatively small bundle of them,
they're strong enough that...
Even if tried quite hard,
there's no chance of me breaking it.
Now, that then evolved into something
that looked a little bit more like this.
It's kind of a material woven out of those glass fibers.
And by the '40s, Games Slayter
and Dale Kleist stiffened this weave with resin,
creating what's known today as fiberglass.
But just how strong is fiberglass?
So, this is our test rig.
These two huge jaws are gonna
pull at that fiberglass you got stuck in the middle there,
and they can apply up to 30 tons of force.
Let's start the test.
And you can see on here the graph of the force
increasing as we go through the experiment.
This is very tense.
Ohh! And there we go...
you can see a pretty clear line of failure there,
and if we look on the graph here,
we can read off... wow!
That failed at 52,000 Newtons,
which is 5.2 tons.
That's like five family cars.
That piece of fiberglass was strong enough
to hold that much weight.
This chance discovery made for a robust alternative
to wood and sheet metal.
Tough, moldable, and super lightweight,
fiberglass can stand up
to the most demanding conditions.
To tackle the world's most inhospitable climate,
engineers are taking fiberglass to a whole new level...
to envelope Antarctica's Halley VI.
These panels are made of special
low-temperature composites with a foam-filled liner.
The massively proof against the environment
that we live in here.
Cryogenically tested to minus 40 degrees,
the outer skin is just 8 inches thick.
Not only is the glass-reinforced plastic super strong,
it's also extremely lightweight...
The glass-reinforced plastic
keeps the construction very lightweight
and therefore minimizes the load onto the legs,
which is obviously important on ice as your foundations.
...Even with the largest panel
measuring 375 square feet.
The last panel... on it goes.
Button up. Hopefully it'll line up, but, uh, probably not.
Engineers cover all eight modules
in just one week.
That's good. We're there.
Creating a life-sustaining environment
in Antarctica is a huge achievement.
But for Halley VI to remain
standing in these icy conditions,
engineers seek inspiration
from history's revolutionary innovators...
Aah!
...To produce more impossible engineering.
Engineers have developed one of the world's
most pioneering modular structures.
Halley VI defies Antarctica's brutal climate,
allowing scientists to carry out crucial research
and still survive in total isolation.
We have this fabulous station that enables us
to operate in a year-round way.
The station can support life
throughout an incredibly harsh winter.
But it's also providing a home.
An entirely self-sufficient structure,
two energy modules contain water
and sewage treatment plants,
a medical facility includes areas
for operations and dentistry,
and there are plenty of creature comforts
for this home away from home.
Most places of work are not also
where you're living, socializing, eating.
It's got to not only be a functional,
but also a really comfortable building.
It's a very well-insulated station.
It has very good control systems in it,
which allow us to track temperatures,
make sure that we're not overheating or underheating,
and we can observe the whole station
from a computer terminal inside.
Halley VI's structure sustains life in temperatures
below minus 58 degrees.
But if this engineering phenomenon
is to reach its 20-year life span,
it must deal with another force of nature.
So, we get so much snow falling every year here.
Anything that's left here just gets buried very rapidly.
Halley VI's five predecessors
have been engulfed by these relentless conditions,
becoming part of the ice shelf itself.
So how can engineers rise above
this seemingly impossible problem?
Engineers must turn to another of history's genius innovations.
At a cemetery in London, scientist Suzie Sheehy
is seeking out the burial grounds of a vital discovery.
15 feet below me is a unique piece of engineering history,
but it's in a setting that's not for the faint hearted.
This place is amazing!
Directly beneath the site of a former chapel
lies a network of subterranean passageways.
The 180-year-old west Norwood catacombs
were once the final resting place for wealthy
and aristocratic families.
During the Victorian period,
mourning the dead was a serious business,
and instead of burying your loved ones
in the ground, the preferred option,
if you could afford it, was to bring them here.
There are about 3,000 coffins here lining the walls,
but getting each of these coffins
into their paid-for
and allocated space was no easy task.
To contain the potentially
deadly bacteria produced by the deceased,
the coffins had to be made completely air tight
by a heavy inner layer.
When it's lined with lead,
it can weigh over 200 kilograms.
And getting something that heavy around 15 feet underground
required a pretty clever piece of engineering.
In 1795, English inventor Joseph Bramah
took the engineering world by storm
patenting the hydraulic press.
But turning his revolutionary invention
on its head offered the perfect solution
for lowering and raising
Norwood catacombs coffins to the chapel above.
This is a catafalque lift.
So the coffin would sit on here,
and then it would take about 45 seconds to be
brought all the way down,
and this catafalque needed to be lifted
all the way back up again.
And that's where Bramah's hydraulic press principle
comes in
and all centers on this clever pump system here.
So, in operation this handle would have been lifted
all the way up and a hydraulic fluid
would have rushed in to the cylinder.
And then when the handle gets lowered back down again,
the pressure would be forced through there
to another larger piston,
which then lifts the catafalque.
In this water-filled system,
the large strokes exerted on the small piston transfer
to the large piston underneath the coffin,
producing small but powerful movements.
Inching upward, it took 180 strokes
for a 440-pound casket
to reach the chapel above.
So, I can demonstrate the principle
of a hydraulic press using this,
which is like the one we had inside but upside down.
So all I have to do is exert
a small force over this side over a large distance,
and that's transferred by our constant pressure
to this ram,
which is gonna exert a large force
over a small distance,
and the force should be sufficient
to break this brick.
Aah!
Wow, that was surprisingly easy.
Took me just a couple of strokes of this to exert so much force
that the bricks literally shattered.
Bramah's hydraulic press
was so successful that the same principle
is used in almost every modern hydraulic system.
It was a brilliant piece of engineering.
Aah!
Faced with extreme drifting snow,
British antarctic survey engineer Chris Martin
can draw on Bramah's hydraulic innovation
to keep the 1,100-ton Halley VI above ground.
We have this fabulous station, which is supported on
the 34 computer-controlled hydraulic legs.
Each telescopic leg
is made up of two 18-inch cylinders
cleverly controlled from within the space frame.
We have this blue hydraulic ram,
and that allows the two cylinders
to move apart and, in doing so,
allows the building's legs to be raised.
Every year when the winter storms roll in,
the eight modules go through a metamorphosis.
Extending leg one.
We simply start at one end of the platform,
and we lift up each leg individually,
and we pack snow underneath it.
Each lift raises the leg 5 feet
to the superstructure's collar.
Once the entire 650-foot-long station
reaches this back-filled level,
Halley VI can then be lifted once more,
continually stepping over the rising winter snow.
We can actually check inclination,
we can spot movement,
and we can advise the guys on the ground
if anything needs to be done to accommodate movement
in the snow.
This creative solution has conquered one
of Antarctica's harshest meteorological challenges.
But another huge hurdle remains,
and Halley VI's engineers must call on another
of history's great innovators...
This is incredible!
What a machine!
...to produce more impossible engineering.
Halley VI, Antarctica...
situated thousands of miles from civilization,
this research station can
withstand earth's most extreme conditions,
allowing the British antarctic survey
to carry out vital research.
We've been collecting data in this area for over 60 years,
so we need to be able to house
the scientists in safety and comfort.
However, Halley VI must face
another devastating force of nature.
Its location, the brunt ice shelf,
is constantly moving and completely unpredictable.
The stresses in the ice shelf have opened up a crevasse
that we call chasm I.
This chasm I has started to grow in the direction
of our Halley VI research station.
If we leave the station where it is at the moment,
then it might mean that Halley VI
will be on an iceberg.
To avoid floating off into the Southern ocean,
Halley VI must be able to relocate.
But how do you move an 1,100-ton,
650-foot-long giant?
Achieving this would have been impossible
without the engineering breakthroughs of the past.
Mechanical engineer Daniel Dickrell is in Florida
to unleash a truly mind-blowing feat of engineering.
Reaching an astonishing 55 miles per hour,
the hellcat's top speed and maneuverability
earned it a legendary status on the battlefield.
It's driven by a 16-liter gasoline-powered radial engine
putting out 450 horsepower.
Now, the secret to the hellcat's success
is not that horsepower itself...
it's how that horsepower gets from the engine
to those tracks.
This is possible
through the hellcat's innovative transmission.
Up to the late 1930s,
armored vehicles like the Sherman
used standard manual transmission
similar to your everyday car to transfer
the engine's power to its tracks.
Manual transmissions rely on moving mechanical power
from the engine to the transmission
through a series of interlocking metal gears.
You get that wrong, and you have a horrible grinding noise
that we all can recognize.
But in 1939, a team at general motors,
including young engineer Oliver Kelley,
developed a more efficient solution for the automobile.
Unlike manual transmission,
the hydramatic transferred
an engine's power automatically through a fluid
via two fan-like components in a sealed unit.
And it works like this... We have two fans.
One we're gonna call the impeller,
one we're gonna call the turbine.
The impeller's connected to the engine side,
so what that means is we have always have
our impeller side moving.
The second fan represents the turbine,
which drives a vehicle's wheels.
It has no direct power source
and takes its energy directly from the impeller's flow.
It's not moving, all right?
So, let's say I want to pull away.
I take my foot off the brake.
We notice the turbine slowly begins to turn.
During world war ii,
Kelley applied his expertise to armored vehicles,
but soon realized a transmission power delay
could prevent the hellcat from getting a fast start.
The slow start was gonna be a problem.
When you're trying to move a large tank on a battlefield,
it could be potentially fatal.
So Kelley's team
complemented their auto transmission
with another piece of engineering
to create what's called a torque converter.
Inside the hellcat, toothed staters are positioned
in the middle of the fluid coupling,
redirecting the oil flow from the impeller,
increasing torque and allowing the turbine driving the wheels
to get to speed almost instantaneously,
creating an explosive standing start.
You can see just what a difference it makes
when we run the hellcat against
one of the most successful vehicles
of world war ii, the Jeep.
Daniel is re-creating an actual challenge
carried out during the 1940s,
one that is almost impossible to believe...
a race between a 20-ton hellcat
and the nimble, lightweight 4x4.
First up in this battle of transmissions,
the manually operated Jeep is timed from a standing start
at a 300-foot distance.
Go!
Okay, 17 seconds... not too bad.
But remember, he's got mechanical gear chains,
a manual transmission...
lots of things that could have gone wrong.
The hellcat is 18 times heavier than the Jeep.
Hellcat, are you ready?
We are ready, over.
But it's equipped with Kelley's
groundbreaking auto technology.
Go!
Wow, that was incredible... 15.9!
Whoo-hoo-hoo!
The hellcat actually is faster from a standing start.
Building a torque converter for a 20-ton tank
is one thing, but adapting it
to move an 1,100-ton ice base
through planet earth's harshest environment
is another.
The guys are probably wondering
what they've let themselves in for.
To avoid chasm I, the engineers for Halley vl
must adapt this groundbreaking technology
to make the impossible possible.
The Halley VI research station...
situated in the harsh wilds of Antarctica,
this groundbreaking base is the world's first
relocatable research facility.
But as the chasm I crevasse
creeps dangerously towards Halley VI,
structural adviser Ben Rowe
and his team must use torque converters developed
in the 1930s to shift their structure,
which is around six times the weight of the hellcat.
We are relocating Halley VI 23 kilometers
further up the ice shelf.
It means that we're moving over
1,000 tons of building here.
It's quite a big engineering task.
The concept is that the station is modular,
so it breaks down into eight
different modules individually towed.
To break this central module, dubbed
"big red," from the ice...
We're not ready in here.
...requires a staggering 66 tons of start-up force.
Three, two, one, engage.
A fleet of bulldozers and tractors equipped
with torque converters generating 1,000 horsepower
take on this mammoth task.
This substantial pulling power is only possible
because of another clever piece of engineering.
The skis are made from steelwork,
about four meters by one meter wide,
and the bottom of each ski has a plastic-like sheeting,
which actually helps with the slip resistance.
The combination of brute force
and cutting-edge solutions complete Halley VI's
seemingly impossible move in just 75 days.
This inconceivable structural masterpiece
was created in four years.
Completed in 2012,
genius-level design and engineering
continued to keep the world's
most inhospitable conditions at bay.
On a day like this, the guys who've just come down
to face the next winter's challenges
will be wondering what they've let themselves in for.
However, we have these very clever modules to Halley VI.
By learning from the pioneers of the past...
Oh!
...Adapting and making innovations of their own,
engineers have set a new milestone.
They have succeeded in making the impossible possible.
I think the Halley that we have now is incredibly impressive,
And if you are lucky enough to spend a winter here,
and you get to see the silhouettes...
the modules against the Southern lights...
that's a really special experience.