A whole tonne!
Why that's 5% of the useful lift of an airship built in 1918 (the R34)
Haven't we come far in the last 90 years!
'World's largest' airship inflated in colossal Alabama cowshed
The "world's largest airship" - according to its makers - was inflated for the first time yesterday and is undergoing ground tests inside a mighty roofed exhibition hall in Alabama which in normal times offers "the space for 1500 cattle". The "Bullet 580" ship measures 235 feet long and 65 feet in diameter. It is intended …
-
-
-
Friday 21st May 2010 08:41 GMT Jared Hunt
Hydrogen vs. Helium
AFAIK there isn't a lot of difference in lifting ability between hydrogen and helium. The reason that the rigid bodied Zeppelins favoured by ze Germans were filled with the more flammable substance was cheifly because the yanks owned most of the worlds supply of helium and wouldn't sell it to them.
Which, considering what the germans were using Zeppelins for during wartime, could be considered fair enough. :oD
-
Friday 21st May 2010 08:57 GMT Stevie
Bah!
They also don't coat the covering with powdered rocket fuel any more. The flames given off by the Hindenburg were highly visible in the B&W newsreel footage. Hydrogen burns with an almost invisible blue flame, so non-radiant that it is quite dangerous to have your hands near a burning hydrogen flame (as I once discovered during my youth). Almost all the heat produced in a hydrogen fire goes up, not out, so not only can't you see the flame, you can't feel it either (until you pass your hand through it).
What you can see in the Hindenburg footage is the outer skin burning off. It was doped using an alumin(i)um-based compound quite similar to the one they pack into the solid fuel boosters that the Shuttle employs.
I think The Onion said it best: "Once again one of these seemingly invincible leviathans of the air has proved as fragile as gasoline-soaked tissue paper".
I think probably the airship will remain an indescribably attractive yet unattainable nirvana. Not because of the flammability of the gas, though that is of course a concern, but because of the vagaries of the atmosphere. The Airship is so long that if the nose experiences lift due to non-homogeneous air density over its length it will try and stand vertical, at which point the pressure differentials and expansion behaviour of the gas in the cells fight to keep it that way.
Of course, modern computer controls might be able to mitigate the behaviour, but the airship is a fundamentally unreliable device, IMO.
-
Monday 24th May 2010 08:21 GMT John Fielder
check your history please
what turned out to be dangerous on the Zepplins was not the hydrogen, which everyone knew was dangerous and was treated with respect, but the dope put on the clothe covering to strengthen and stiffen it. It was highly enflamable and was set alight by the static electricity.
it's always the things you don't think of that cause trouble
-
-
-
Thursday 20th May 2010 15:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Largest? 1 Tonne Payload?
I think the size record still belongs to the Hindenburg doesn't it. IIRC that was about 800ft by 120ft. A bit bigger than this poxy blimp.
As for the payload. That would be about a dozen healthy adults with no luggage.
So nowhere near as big or capable as something built over 70 years ago.
Not impressed.
-
-
-
Thursday 20th May 2010 16:02 GMT leakyPC
Sounds like a fair idea
I would also think using Battery power would be another way to solve this problem, chuck some light weight solar energy collecting material on top (I know this kind of thing doesn't exist yet) and then there would be no need for batteries as long as your above the clouds.
-
-
-
Friday 21st May 2010 10:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Golden Age?
The golden age of air travel had nothing to do with airships. That was more down to lanes like the Empire class flying boats. Very few passengers = lots of room = high staff to passenger ratio = blooming expensive tickets. Also low flying speeds meant long journeys were completed over a number of days setting down every day for lunch and for an overnight stop.
Airships were never really a serious proposition, although a few people tried to make them so they never made any money. And people are even less likely to want to fly that way now that everybody rushes everywhere.
-
-
Friday 21st May 2010 08:57 GMT Stevie
Hoorah!
Anyone up for forming a consortium to buy and operate these on the Huntington-Manhattan run?
Anyone who has been a victim of the bloody Long Island Rail Road, the world's saddest excuse for a commuter mass transit system, would pay a premium to avoid having to do business with them any more. This is a market waiting to be exploited.
With advance ticket sales you'd know how much operating capital you'd have to work with each month and could easily see where service needed cutting back or expanding, and by not running an off-peak service you could save a bundle.
I wonder if the Empire State building management would be interested in using their observation deck for its original purpose?
Best of all, speed wouldn't be a factor since the only competition is the bloody Long Island Rail Road and on a good day a snail with gout could beat one of their trains.
I used to commute from Coventry to London in the time they take to get me the 40 miles from my house to Brooklyn. Or not, about five times a year, when it all becomes too much for the poor dears. So much for the 21st Century.
-
Friday 21st May 2010 08:58 GMT Marcelo Rodrigues
Something I never understood...
Is all this problem with excess lift after they burned some fuel. I mean, why not just make one or two large baloons inside the baloon?
Then they could just pump atmospheric air inside the baloons. It would have a two fold effect:
1) More weight inside the blimp (the compressed air)
2) The helium would be compressed by the secondary baloons, thus getting denser. This would surely diminish the lift generate.
Yes, yes. I know compressed gas gets hotter. But the pressure would be low, and the area huge. Wouldn't it have enough dissipating area?
There must be something I'm missing here. It's just too easy and simple.
-
-
Friday 21st May 2010 22:13 GMT Marcelo Rodrigues
Don't know about the fuel...
I mean, the air would be compressed at low pressures. Have You ever seen a jackhammer? They use a bloody huge compressor - and can run all day with... what? 50l of diesel?
We are talking about much lower pressures here - so the ratio fuel/compressed air would be even better.
-
-
-
-
Friday 21st May 2010 09:38 GMT Doug 3
condensate system
maybe using the huge gas chamber as a distributed storage system for the ballast fluid is what they're using. Circulation systems keep the gas and gasified fluid distribution equally throughout but forward and aft ballast systems extract fluid from the gas chamber as needed.
it's about time we got back to using these kinds of things for cargo transport. The lack of understanding of what took out the Hindenburg destroyed a whole industry for decades.
-
Friday 21st May 2010 09:48 GMT The Indomitable Gall
The answer to the bouyancy problem is simple:
OK, so you need to lose lift as you lose weight in fuel. So what if your fuel was your lifting agent? This takes care of itself.
That means one thing and one thing only: hydrogen. Unsafe, you cry? Well they keep trying to put it in our cars, so it can't be that bad.
Anyway, a hybrid helium/hydrogen airship could be very safe, with an envelope-in-envelope design.
Have an outer inflation chamber (or series of chambers) filled with helium, and an internal chamber filled with hydrogen. In that way, if the hydrogen cell ruptures, it leaks into a 100% inert atmosphere and cannot explode. For hydrogen gas to escape, there would need to be a total failure of the entire balloon system, which would probably mean a fatal plummet anyway, so the added risk from the hydrogen is negligible.
Besides, the Hindenberg exploded because of a fault in its skin and problems with sparking from static electricity -- modern materials aren't as succeptible to such problems, so a leak would simply be a leak. Explosions are unlikely.
-
Friday 21st May 2010 10:52 GMT GrahamT
Nice idea but...
The weather has more effect on these than heavier than air machines. Both in America watching the Goodyear blimp, and here watching a Virgin Lightship trying to navigate in winds that wouldn't worry a microlight, I was shocked at how uncontrollable these things become especially on take-off.
You can't tack an airship. I saw a pilot try to once and all the headway he had made into the wind was immedately lost as the Virgin blimp was turned sideways by the wind and blown back past its starting point. The Goodyear ship was bucking and tossing like a rodeo bull as it headed into gusty wind. Any passengers must have been seriously airsick. I hadn't believed something so big could move so much, so quickly.
Maybe if they are as big as the Zeppelins and above ground turbulence, then they could ride the weather better.
As for bouyancy, submarines have been compressing and decompressing air forever to control bouyancy, I'm sure similar could be done with helium. A dirigible especially could have cells with membranes separating helium from air, with the proportion being varied to control bouyancy. The compression would be quite slow as the fuel is used, so the heat could be dissipated in the air, and decompression only happens during refueling, so the gas could be re-heated from ground station provided energy, i.e. plug the nozzle heaters into the mains. Failling that use the engines' waste heat to warm it.
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
Friday 21st May 2010 22:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
The only advantage...
...I can see now, should it ever run out of fuel (be that diesel, hydrogen), it won´t plummet to the ground or inevitably glide towards it, like certain other heavier-than-air flying contraptions. Just vent some gas off or call for a helicopter with towing cables. Being adrift mid-air should proven absurd, but it beats forced landing.
On second thought, given it doesn´t need runways to take off or land, it still needs something akin to airport facilities (and huge ones at that), which would be the main reason why airplanes must carry extra fuel; they either go back from where they took off, or land anywhere (not so) near their intended objective.
Can it cross the Atlantic in 18 hours or less? Ok let's be fair, make it 24 hours. A cruise ship would make it in 24 days, perhaps...?
On the other hand, we have the (military) Osprey, that can land almost anywhere, fly faster than any chopper, can carry the same or more payload, but got some proven reliability issues.
-
Monday 24th May 2010 10:00 GMT Yesnomaybe
Someone do the maths, please
How much could you vary the lift in a gas-bag (No insult intended) on the sort of scales we are talking about here, if you used modern materials for the bag (Mylar perhaps?) and compressed the gas within by squeezing the bag. Could squeeze the bag by having straps running around it, and use a winch (Quick response time) or have another, smaller bag inside, and fill this with air.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
