I found this today in a university salvage yard, while photographing abandoned buildings. I can’t figure out what it is, but it looks like it cost a zillion dollars and is just sitting in the mud and the snow now, next to dismantled aerial towers and what looks like a dismantled metal sculpture.
My first thought is that it’s some kind of microwave-frequency device - the stub pipe and so forth look like waveguides I’ve seen and worked with. OTOH, it seems to be built to handle pressure - or maybe its segmented construction is to allow very fine interior machining.
I have no idea what it is, but someone spent a long time bolting all those sections together.
I would guess that it was a prototype for something. All those small sections could (I assume) be made fairly cheaply* and some grad students could spend a day bolting them all together.
*For example, an entire row, all the way around, could be made from one mold.
Whatever it is, I doubt it was designed to hold pressure. It seems to be bolted together from hundreds of little pieces. Each joint between pieces is a place for whatever the contents are to leak out, there’s no reason you’d use something impossible to seal properly like this instead of an off-the-shelf pressure tank. The waveguide idea might be correct, that wouldn’t need to hold pressure. It also occurs to me that it might be a mold for casting something. You could fill it with something (cement? molten plastic?) and then unbolt the little pieces to disassemble the mold afterwards. Even then, I’d wonder why it would have to be so many pieces, when a few larger pieces should work just as well.
It’s in a university salvage yard, along with all kinds of “stored” hardware in and out of various buildings.
I’d guess it’s about three feet in diameter. Maybe a tad bigger.
I am not sure if it’s sitting on an open face of some kind; I neither wanted to mess with it nor was sure I could move it anyway. I had to slog across fifty feet of slushy muck to get this close and was not about to set my camera down anywhere there.
The pipes attached to it are similarly modular. It looks like it’s a prototype of some process designed to make any kind of vessel or conduit from parts made on a very small scale - like a proof of concept for a portable machine designed to manufacture containers or habitats of any size at destination.
Then again, maybe it’s just meant to be a vacuum vessel - still a lot of joints, but they would tend to close under compression.
It does superficially resemble some reactor vessels I’ve seen (on paper) - for example:
I’d think it would be for holding a vacuum, rather than holding high pressure. Maybe for doing experiments with plasma. Its interior could have received a final plating after being assembled, to improve its impermeability.
In addition to what I said above about possibly being cheap to manufacture, it’s also modular and the port holes could easily be moved anywhere within the same row that they’re currently in. The pipe(s) could also easily be turned or twisted easily enough.
I don’t know what it is, but I do know how to find out. It almost certainly came from the physics department originally, and even if the original user has died or moved on, he almost certainly has collaborators, former grad students, or labmates still around who would know what it is. Call up (or e-mail) the physics department and ask.
I just noticed that around the center, there’s a row of bolts facing inward. Something is or was bolted to the inside. The go up towards the edges as well.