The insurmountable problem so far on these cargo airships is ballast. It's what killed off the Cargolifter Project (as I read while sitting naked under a palm tree in its former hangar. [0])
Their killer use case is moving heavy stuff to inaccessible areas. Wind turbines being the flavour of the moment. They combine the long distance capability of a plane, the hovering of a helicopter and the lift capacity of a crane...
However, once the 160 tonne payload has been dropped, the ship either needs to take on 160 tonnes of ballast or jettison helium (not an option since it's so expensive). The Cargolifter idea was to just pump up water if I remember correctly, but for land-based tasks that meant being met by ten tanker lorries at the drop site, thus negating all the benefits and meaning you might as well stick the cargo straight on those trucks.
I'd love to see it work out, but so far these projects have been nothing but a wipeout for investors. Coincidentally back in 2006 I worked a couple of desks over from people managing the liquidation of Skycat, which was basically the same thing, also built at Cardington. It may even have been the same team.
Compress the helium into tanks and use atmosphere as ballast. Ballast can be dropped by directly purging with helium. Alternatively, contain the ballast in bladders that vent as helium pressure rises. Designing flexible bladders that don't leak too badly would be an engineering problem. A terribly inefficient option would be to allow the gasses to mix and just use fractionation to separate the heavy elements when dropping ballast.
It seems like it should also be usable for shipping between non-remote places, in situations where you need more speed than a boat can provide but don't want to pay the full premium for air freight.
For instance, I seem to recall that Apple ships their laptops by air from Asia to keep the supply lines short. Shipping by boat might be too slow, but this thing might be able to cross the Pacific quickly enough, and at a lower cost than a conventional airplane. A route like this would have warehouses on either end, so you could easily have ballast waiting for the airship whenever it needed it. (You'd probably just pump water from the Pacific at one end, then put it back in the Pacific at the other end.)
>(You'd probably just pump water from the Pacific at one end, then put it back in the Pacific at the other end.)
You most certainly would not. Because the risk of spreading invasive marine species the MARPOL convention doesn't allow it. This means ships have to gradually replace all their ballast water during a passage. Just don't repeat Cougar Ace's mistake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar_Ace
An interesting, though probably semi-insane, alternative.
What about having a tank on-board, that normally is filled with air, that, when you drop off the payload, gets filled with liquid air instead? It'd be power-hungry, but meh. I mean: liquid air has a density of ~0.87g/cm^3 - it's not so far off that of water.
Tank mass would kill you, but as you say, the actual lifting capacity is relatively cheap.
Many years ago (in the 80s), my parents took me on a road trip which happened to go through Tillamook, OR (yes, famous for cheese). At the time there were two huge WW2-era blimp hangars there, one of which housed a company building a blimp that had a rather novel solution to this problem. The blimp itself was neutrally buoyant and had four wing-like rotors with propellers at the end; the whole unit spun slowly. Lift and angle/direction were controlled by changing the blade angles like a helicopter. They were out field testing it, which is why we stopped by and chatted for a couple hours (yes, I am the son of engineers).
Picture a cross between a blimp and a Triebflügeljäger.
I heard they went out of business before getting it into production and I can't seem to find any relevant information on Google. Anyone know what it was called? I imagine that it would be much easier to develop the control systems today than it was back in the early 80s.
Since then, one of the two hangars burned down and the other has been converted to an air museum. The structure itself is actually worth a visit on its own - one of the largest wooden structures in the world.
Exactly this, and you can't really navigate in cross winds (although the M&M shaped craft was trying to negate that by being a saucer). The steam punk in me would love to see zeppelins again in the sky but I somehow doubt we will.
:) I used to go to Tropical Islands every weekend when I was sleeping in a van in Berlin. It's an amazing place from an engineering point of view. And the spa is the best I've ever been to.
The 225 burns 16 tons of fuel per hour while flying.
This airship has 4x 325 HP V8 engines. Roughly speaking they each use about 150lbs of fuel per hour to generate 325 HP. That's 0.3 tons per hour between the four of them.
Now of course the 225 will do 5x the speed of the Airlander 10, so where the 225 would use 16 tons to go 500 miles, the 10 would use 1.5 tons.
Here's where things get interesting, though. The frontal surface area tends to dominate drag, where as the volume is what gives you lift capacity. You can scale volume much faster than frontal area and that means 10x (or 100x) the lift capacity might only be 2x (or 10x) the fuel consumption.
Avoiding complex oversize load transports on roads and ships, avoiding the need for nearby airstrips. Just hover above the manufacturing site, lift up the payload, fly to the destination and drop it of. At least this was the main motivation behind CargoLifter [1].
I would love to see how this aircraft would function at high altitude such as in Nepal. This could have a huge positive impact around Everest, especially with white knuckle Lukla airport.
World reserves are 40 billion cubic meters, yearly production is 175 million cubic meters. It seems we have 200 years supply. And it's a renewable resource (produced during radioactive decay), and universe has a lot of helium, 23% of its baryonic mass.
Yeah, we can all quote from Wikipedia. Here's another interesting quote about Helium:
*Moses Chan, Evan Pugh Professor of Physics at Penn State, explains that the world's supply of helium is a byproduct of natural gas production, with the Texas Panhandle arguably being the helium capital of the world. However, says Chan, "Very few natural gas wells in the world have enough helium in the well to make it economical to separate helium from natural gas. The gas wells with the most helium have only about 0.3 percent, so it is in short supply." In response to the element's scarcity, the United States has been stockpiling helium since the 1960s in a National Helium Reserve called the Bush Dome, a deep underground reservoir outside of Amarillo, Texas. By the mid 1970s 1.2 billion cubic meters of the gas was stored there. The current reserve is approximately 0.6 billion cubic meters, or roughly 4 times the current world market. But, Chan notes, in 1996 the Helium Privatization Act mandated that the Department of the Interior sell off all the stockpiled helium by 2015. "As a consequence," he says, "the United States government is selling the equivalent of 40 percent of the world market of helium at a below-market price." This action discourages the active exploration of helium," Chan explains, "since companies can buy it from the United States at a cheap price and sell it at a premium."
Currently helium is being sold off at a below-market price. When the reserve gets low, people will look at it and go "huh. We could make some money off of helium when the reserve runs out", and look for other sources.
We already did the same sort of thing for oil. We didn't panic when the initial wells and types of wells started to go dry - we found other sources.
If you're trying to point out that the Earth is finite, although you are correct, the scale is... large. Everything that decays via alpha decay ultimately makes helium.
Not to mention that a) worse comes to worse, we can always make our own, and b) it's literally >20% of the universe's (baryonic) mass.
The question is whether it's economic to use, not if it will run out.
It's only a reference to what was implied in your post. Nothing more.
a) Even though you may be able to decay the entire Earth into helium, it is only produced at a constant rate. If the rate of use is higher than the rate of production, you will still run out.
b) Which we have 0 access to.
c) You won't be able to always just "find other sources" of finite resources (I'm thinking more than just helium [unless you plan on becoming a pure helium lifeform]) and the Earth will become uninhabitable long before our resources are exhausted.
a) Not true. As I said: worse comes to worse we can always make our own. Alpha decay can be induced with particle beams, etc. Now, it's horridly inefficient, etc, etc. But it's possible.
b) What don't we have access to? The rest of the universe? True, for now. However, we don't "even" need to go interstellar for it.
c) No, we won't be able to forever. However, the thing is: with helium at least, the sources known now are sufficient, in raw quantity at least, until so far in the future that good luck predicting what our needs will be. It makes someone before the rise of automobiles calculating what the horse manure removal would have to be in 2100 look shortsighted.
What is 'sufficient'? How long a view are you taking on this?
With small percentages of natural gas containing helium (0-7%), much of what's currently coming up isn't being captured or is only now starting to be in Qatar and Russia. The rest is just let go, and once helium get's into the air it's over.
Luckily, as you suggested, prices going up means people are starting to build helium recycling systems. However congress made them artificially low and thus speed up unnecessary wastage of this precious resource.
If you're only concerned about the next 200 years, can you imagine if that was the same attitude in the 1600's? What would we have now?
Now imagine if we really are all flying around in giant helium aircraft because oil has run out or is too expensive... how much helium is getting used up for that purpose alone? There's far more natural gas/oil than helium.
Their killer use case is moving heavy stuff to inaccessible areas. Wind turbines being the flavour of the moment. They combine the long distance capability of a plane, the hovering of a helicopter and the lift capacity of a crane...
However, once the 160 tonne payload has been dropped, the ship either needs to take on 160 tonnes of ballast or jettison helium (not an option since it's so expensive). The Cargolifter idea was to just pump up water if I remember correctly, but for land-based tasks that meant being met by ten tanker lorries at the drop site, thus negating all the benefits and meaning you might as well stick the cargo straight on those trucks.
I'd love to see it work out, but so far these projects have been nothing but a wipeout for investors. Coincidentally back in 2006 I worked a couple of desks over from people managing the liquidation of Skycat, which was basically the same thing, also built at Cardington. It may even have been the same team.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort