Not sure if this has got too much of a mention in the national news but at the other end of Hampshire to where I am the Ocado warehouse is still cooking nicely 40 hours after it started. Despite the building having sprinklers they didn?t seem to be able to help much and as it is built as a robotic warehouse it has been difficult for Human firefighters to enter without endangering themselves. Food can burn quite well as the loss of some warehouses in the WW2 blitz period showed quite well but another reason for the fires intensity now being considered is the batteries of the numerous robotic machines . It has been mentioned on this group before about some types of modern battery being difficult to extinguish, if this is the case then having large numbers of them in close proximity may be a risk that will need some revised firefighting procedures in the future. Something to be considered when we have a multiple pile up of electric vehicles or those ideas for battery swap stations or big storage batteries by the side of the house.
Oh yes indeed it made national news as the Brigade thought it almost out then it suddenly burst out and went bonkers. There is a suspicion that something very flammable must have been breached which the services were not aware of. One of the blokes interviewed said that one of his issues was that access was designed for robots, not people. Not being a robot, I cannot comment, but last night when I went to bed they had evacuated a lot of houses in order to attempt to remove ammonia tanks on part of the roof being threatened by the fire. I'm assuming they managed to either keep them cool or remove them in the end. They are giving advice , the company that is, that customers need to check their orders progress on the web site and if they are shopped as they put it, then delivery will occur, otherwise there will be delays as they have to find out where some stock is in other centres. That building I know is only 2 years old for goodness sake! I remember them opening it in a burst of publicity as one of the first custom designed robotic warehouses in the UK. Does not bode well for health and safety. People will not be clamouring to have one down their street, I can see! Brian
Batteries? for what reason? 'industrial' robots are in my experience mains powered, the only batteries will be on the controllers and be the size of a pound coin.
The hydraulics which might have been an issue at one point migrated long ago to stuff that is either water or glycol based, benign chemically and as such near impossible to get it to do anything other than what it's intended to do. Stick a blowtorch on a mist of it and you might get a bit of hamless effects smoke.
shows lots of little robot cars running about on a grid (I don't know if they're called Karels...). They appear to be battery-powered, unless they have some way of picking up power from the grid.
No they are battery operated , despite The Other Mikes initial skeptical reply implying I was making a stupid suggestion I do tend to check things before posting. Far better descriptive video here where a charging station can be seen.
Despite the risk I wouldn?t mind one on a smaller scale in my shed,perhaps Ikea are already working on it. The Ocado one looks to be a later generation of the one in the link you gave with more sophisticated robots, In their installation the machines have the ability to swarm a number together so they could fulfil an order quickly. The report that it is thought to have started in the corner of the grid makes we wonder if it was at the charging Station, I expect we will have to wait to find out. Easy to be wise after the event but perhaps instead of just being at the side of the grid such a station should be within a doored enclosure that would confine a conflagration from a faulty robot or battery charge to that area, in the video I posted the link to they are just to the side of it with no separation at all. Would have thought the possibility of such an event happening eventually with batteries being charged would have been obvious but there you go. I wonder if the Mumsnet brigade are complaining that their groceries are late yet.
Let them carry on playing snooker and just flood it with CO2. It might be useful to site places like this next to carbon burning power stations and pipe in the combustion products after suitable treatment - yet another one bit the dust today, Cottam 2GW closing in September.
Approaching the end of an era. I was present at the start.
Bits of this have been posted before.
During my thin sandwich degree course with what became GEC (and subsequently Alst[h]om), I did have spells at both Eggborough and Fiddlers Ferry. All that generation of power stations with 500 MW alternators had suffered from delays and faults requiring significant repair work - things were about 5 years late at the time. (1) The previous designs had been 120 MW, and a number of aspects hadn't scaled well, resulting in premature and catastrophic failures.
The factory capacity to rebuild stators was limited, so one was being done on site at Eggborough. This involved one of the dodgiest lifting arrangements I have ever seen.
To do the work, the stator frame had been stood on end on the floor of the turbine hall. For those who don't know, this is an assembly weighing, when complete with laminations and windings, around 200 tons, with a diameter around 3 m and length 3 or 4 times that.
The two station cranes needed a spreader beam to share the load. In order to get slings onto the lifting trunnions bolted onto each side of the stator frame, another spreader was needed, so one was borrowed from the factory at Trafford Park. As it happened, this had been specially made for a pair of cranes which were of slightly different ratings, and was asymmetric.
This meant that, when inverted, with its double hook suspended from the double hook of the station spreader, it needed a chain block to pull it horizontal. I don't know who worked out what its rating needed to be, but getting things level took some time.
The task was to lift the stator and turn it end-over-end, so, once the Heath Robinson rig was aloft, a wire rope was connected to a winch at ground level to get the whole thing to rotate on the trunnions.
Luck was with them that day.
(1) One of my tasks involved taking the shipping rubber bands off a cabinet of relays, which were already well outside their stamped warranty date. I was intrigued by one relay whose function was, as condenser vacuum fell, to open the turbine hall roof vents, so that the anticipated blast (2) didn't take all the windows out.
(2) The low pressure turbine casings included a special explosion vent comprising a thin metal sheet normally sucked onto a mesh frame, with a sharp spike poised above it. If pressure becomes positive, the metal bulges and is pierced by the spike to vent to atmosphere
50 years ago, my school arranged a tour round a power station. It was all new to me, and I asked lots of questions:
Why are the furnaces like that? (They powdered the coal then blew it into the furnaces.) Why not stick it in a bed with say limestone to absorb some of the pollutants and blow air through it?
What's the good of these huge chimneys? They just spread the pollution over a wider area?
There were, unfortunately, lots of less good questions asked, too. I must have been exasperating.
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