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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, how do you make pieces of glass that size?

It was manufactured in 2004 by a US company, "International Concept Management": https://icm-corp.com/

(side note: what a weird name for an aquarium manufacturing and design company)

According to https://www.newlift.de/details-referenzen/aquadom.html , several companies were involved. Reynolds Polymer Technology, Inc. provided the acrylic windows: https://www.reynoldspolymer.com/projects/aquadom/ .

ICM has already removed AquaDom from their portfolio page https://icm-corp.com/portfolio/ , but a cached version (for now at least) exists at https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XGSNC7... .

Where do you have the year from? The aquarium was opened 2003 after several years of building. And seeing it now, two weeks ago it even had its 19th "birthday". Speak about bad timing.

uuuups... they better lawyer up...

That's Germany, not the US.

yes they better lawyer up in Germany, correct

Not sure about Germany but in the UK the designers would be unlikely to still be liable anymore under the original contract to design this, liability under the contract would be up to 12 years from when the work under the contract was completed. They might be liable in tort for professional negligence but it's much harder to prove that this has occurred especially after 20 years. More likely the company that was under contract to inspect/maintain this will get hammered.

Or the one that modified it, assuming that's not the one that originally built it.

It looks to me as if they're actually a lot of smaller pieces put together, but maybe I see it incorrectly. Maybe one day, architects will stop designing things that are structural liabilities, or engineers actually get to say no to it before construction starts.

I don't understand your comment. Architects did not design this fishtank, engineers did, ones that specialize in such constructions. Whether or not the design was at fault or there were construction or maintenance issues or the tank was modified out-of-spec, whether there was damage due to the recent renovations are all open questions.

Structural engineers take their work very seriously, much more seriously than your typical software person and you can bet that any and all lessons learned from this incident will be incorporated into future designs. They don't just slap stuff together for the laughs and call it a day.

Incredibly unlikely for any part of the structure to have been designed by an architect, most likely a highly specialist subcontractor design item. Our insurance would not cover it and it is illegal for architects to practice without insurance in many EU countries. The closest any architect would get to this is to go to a big fish tank company and say I want a big fish tank with diameter x and height y, can you do it and how much will it be...

They could make it from concrete.

They should use transparent aluminium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_materials#...

Modern sapphire glass (Al₂O₃) is basically transparent aluminium, and it is very strong. Probably way too expensive to make an aquarium out of it, though!

This is an amusing line of inquiry. Sapphire is growing in popularity for microchips. I found a source for single-crystal sapphire ingots... they only go up to 8 inches (~20cm) in diameter, about 60mm long. This tank was about 11 meters in diameter, 25m long. Scaling that up would be quite the project.

I mean, you could probably do chemical vapor deposition, but it wouldn't be a single crystal so what's the point?

"list of Star Trek materials"?

Says a guy named "Cthulhu"? Obviously, he is being humorous.

I think they are acrylic, not glass.

Correct. https://www.bestpub.com/books/product/cid-151.html

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