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New Hydrogen Engine Test Shows Future of Aviation
An anonymous reader writes to mention Boeing has successfully completed tests for the engine that will power HALE, the new prop plane that will be able to stay aloft for long periods of time. "The wünderengine, developed by the Ford Motor Company, went for three days under the simulated conditions of a 65,000-feet flight, which is definitely better than a Taurus and apparently exceeded their expectations on fuel economy. Chris Haddox at Boeing's Advanced Systems said that while it will be several years before HALE flies, the key to this aircraft is the propulsion system and this recent test was very promising."
Would've never guessed that fuel efficiency was prized more by military than civilian customers. Or is there some subsidy for "green" fuels in some Defense appropriations bill?
Hydrogen! Yay! It's everywhere - heck, water is 2/3rds Hydrogen - meaning it is safe and plentiful and when you burn it all you get is water! But then the question becomes: how does one go about making Hydrogen from water? At this point the answer is based soundly in the same thermodynamics that condemns us all to a second stone age: LOTS AND LOTS of energy, my friend, meaning hydrogen solves nothing. Hell, it's not even easy to store the corrosive stuff.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Though yes, ultimately it isn't the greatest solution, as of you'll never get back 100% of the energy you put in. So even once you obtain the hydrogen, and then combust it with atmospheric oxygen, there will be a net loss of energy. However, the big advantage is that its carbon-neutral with regards to the products of combustion.
Hopefully we'll see an even better solution later on. But the nuclear car (also from Ford) never seemed to take off much: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_car
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
While I did laugh, at that comment, let's remember that it's generally accepted now that the Hindenburg burned because of its highly flammable zinc skin, not because of the hydrogen fuel. In fact, hydrogen rises and evaporates so quickly that lives may have been saved because it didn't hang around and burn downward. A lot of people survived.
The skin wasn't zinc, and it wasn't zinc that caused it to burn.
The skin was cotton, and they painted it with aluminum/iron-oxide paint. Basically, liquid thermite. Poof!
From the Wikipedia entry:
The duralumin frame was covered by cotton varnished with iron oxide and cellulose acetate butyrate impregnated with aluminium powder. The aluminum was added to reflect both ultraviolet, which damaged the fabric, and infrared light, which caused heating of the gas.
The explosion happened when it was trying to land during an electric storm. The cotton panels were held to the frame with rope cords which were not painted with the same metal-saturated varnish as the panels themselves. When they dropped the grounding cable during the landing approach, all built-up static from the panels jumped to the frame, sparking the "thermite" varnish. The rest is history.
And you're right about how the use of hydrogen likely saved lives.
Just to add a little more, here...I've been told, though I've not had it confirmed ( I keep hoping to run across it somewhere) that Germany *had* to use hydrogen; the Allies, in part of the long pissing-contest that lead up to WW1, wouldn't let them have any helium. And you're right on the composition of the covering; I saw the same episode...and it makes good sense.
...it's almost like the second one was started, before the first one was ended. Still, as a weapon of war, the dirigible wasn't much of a threat, really.
:) My brother is a welding-sales guy. He tells me that during some of the seminars to which he went, it was revealed to him hand-crank drills, not cutting torches when they were building those first battleships. So, for every porthole you've seen on them in photos, each was *hand*drilled* through inches of steel, not torch-cut like they are today.
:)
Before the Duke was shot in his carriage, a lot of other things were involved, too; Germany had a pissing-contest over the 'new' concept of battleships, starting a technology race, and England was keeping the channels blocked to German traffic. The assassination of the Duke was just a precipitator, once all these factors, and doubtless more were in place.
And in this time a skinny little corporal was caught on film at the speech of the Kaiser, not knowing he'd be centrally involved in the next world war. And about this time, Karl Househoefer was in Japan, learning about the Bushido code, the samurai, and getting the keys to the idea of the SS and the idea of a fabled German homeland. Similarly, Annie Oakley wrote in her diary, "Life on the road [in the Wild West Show] was rewarding, but creepy, too: there are all these Germans measuring ropes, trains, and taking down notes." (Paraphrased) They were finding out how to move lots of men and horses by rail.
And on a similar tangent
Imagine the huge amount of manual labor that musta been!
(See? Next to me, other people on ADD sound downright linear!)
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The ability to, say... orbit above a cave mouth for days and light up someone's world with a few 500-lb bombs whenever they stick their head out is not currently available- the closest we have to this capability is predators (which can deliver a hellfire and can stay aloft for a while but not for a week). Task a couple of these to a mission and you could keep an asset overhead for as long as there's budget- which gets you a couple of things: Instant strike capability, the ability to call in tactical strikes from in-theater assets, the ability to guide in tactical precision munitions, and multiple-strike capability from the same asset (2000 lbs is a ton of hellfire missiles, as it were- or one really big bomb, or any arrangement of 100, 250, 500, 1000- or 2000-lb bombs).
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
More survived than died. IIRC, of the 100 or so people on board, only about 30 died. Almost all of the deaths were from jumping. When it caught fire, people panicked and jumped; the ground is what killed them. Almost everybody who rode the ship to the ground lived to tell their tale. It was a relatively slow and controlled crash, and the flames were all above the people and billowing upward. Try that with an jetliner.
The reason the Hindenburg disaster is remembered so fervently is that it was the first transportation accident covered in mass-media audio/video distribution. Bloody everybody has heard Herbert Morrison's "Oh the humanity". These days, the general population would hardly bat an eye, but at the time, it was unprecedented.
The real tragedy of the Hindenburg disaster is that the world gave up on lighter-than-air craft, perceiving hydrogen-filled balloons as inherently dangerous. In fact, it's very likely it would have been safer than conventional fixed-wing jetliners. You don't fall out of the sky due to engine failure in an airship. Meanwhile, a blimp on approach hold uses drastically less fuel. Sure, they're nowhere near as fast as jets, but they would have made a great complimentary technology.
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