UST: News

A presentation of the new edition of Anatoly Yunitskiy's monograph "String Transport Systems: on Earth and in Space" in Russian and English will be held in April 2019. The book absorbed the results of research in the field of transport achieved by the author over the decades of working on the project. It provides a detailed justification and calculations on the concept of a unique astro-engineering vehicle capable of transferring millions of tons of payload into the near-earth orbit by each voyage, as well as outlining of fundamental principles for the functioning of transport systems known today under the SkyWay brand.

Currently, Yunitskiy's string transport has finally passed over from the field of purely theoretical knowledge to the practical field: in addition to the existing industrial samples of innovative transport, a design school was created, a pilot production facility was set up, and SkyWay company-developer has reached serious international agreements.

Our new video highlights briefly on what formed the basis of Anatoly Yunitskiy's string transport systems and what advantages SkyWay technology has compared to the existing modes of transport.

Translation of the video:

Anatoly Yunitskiy: String transport is a transport of elevated overpass type, where everything moves on an overpass. However, our overpass is absolutely different from the traditional ones. First, it is preliminary stressed along its entire length. It is uncut along its entire length. It does not have expansion joints.

The tension goes to anchor supports that stand on the earth's crust. Therefore, the tension is transferred through the structure to the earth's crust. Figuratively speaking, it is squeezed out. And the track structure is stretched. Since it is stretched, it will never undergo compression, including while temperature rise. It can be easily determined by calculation. Thus, it will never lose stiffness.

A very important point for an overpass is bending moments that actually break the structure. If we take a simply supported beam having its ends, it has its own bending moment diagram. But if we stretch this structure and make it long, its bending moments will decrease twice. So, it requires twice less material to bear the same load.

At high-speed motion (300 km/h and higher), 90% of energy, i.e. fuel consumption by the motor, is spent for aerodynamics. That's why I started to improve it and made it unique. Therefore, our unibus has a unique shape.

If we take any vehicle, for example, a car and raise it up by the height of its size removing the airfoil effect, its aerodynamics will increase by 2.5 times just due to it. Therefore, string transport does not have an airfoil effect, because it has only two rails. It is very important. In addition, due to the improvements of the vehicle features, including aerodynamics, we reduce energy consumption tenfold approximately.

Five territories of Great Britain are rolled down under asphalt and buried under sleepers. This soil is dead. No green plants grow there producing oxygen for our breathing. And now imagine — we will build our routes, remove asphalt, plough up the ground and plant gardens.

Our string tracks need less resources, therefore they will cost tenfold less. It will be less costly for the mankind. Therefore, it would be possible to build tenfold more routes for the same funds.

We transfer traffic to the second level. Aviation is on the third level. We are afraid of airplanes considering them dangerous. No, we should be afraid of cars. If we replace the existing roads (only motor-roads are 36 mln km long in total) with safer, eco-friendlier and less costly string routes, we would be able to save at least 1.5 mln people from deaths on the roads annually.

These seemingly easy things from physics and engineering brought me to creating an optimal transport by a logical path. I did it from a clean sheet of paper, because I have set up such task.