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Canadian Company Plans Solar-Powered Heavier-Than-Air Airships
savuporo writes "By crossing airships with airplanes, Solar Ship is planning to build a craft that can carry heavy loads long distances with a tiny carbon footprint. Filled with helium, they soak up rays from the sun to provide the energy for forward motion and fulfill its original design challenge – carry 1,000 kilograms (2,205 lbs) of payload 1,000 kilometers (621.4 miles). The craft is heavier than air, and uses a combination of helium filling its interior and its lifting body delta wing shape to stay airborne. Solar Ship shows plans for a range of different size craft for different duties."
Interesting concept but, considering we're already due to completely run out of helium on earth at current usage/growth rates around 2035 thanks to wide scale usage in things like MRI's, it doesn't really seem like a sustainable design in any real sense of the word unless they have a secret source of helium we don't know about....
...more ways to waste helium.
Aren't we losing Helium at a rapid rate? How much energy will be required to manufacture more Helium? (If that's even possible)
I was expecting... something a bit more.
I would not be able to visualize the distance without it.
unless we've been fusing helium or annihilating it with antihelium...all the helium thats ever existed on earth is still here (it doesnt even bond to things for the most part!)
yeah yeah its all in where it is located...that's nothing like the problems facing oil supplies. burn a gallon of gas and it no longer exists chemically and physically (barring slight of hand or processes that take millions of years)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
there's a 30 ton model...should be enough for the truck replacement problem.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Iran recentyl claimed to have discovered massive helium reserves:
http://www.google.com/search?q=iran+helium+reserve&site=universal&tbs=cdr%3A1&cd_min=9%2F1%2F2011&cd_max=
Allegedly the estimate is 10 billion cubic meters. That was in September, but there's still no mention in major Western media.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
of helium!!! and hydrogen!
The german company CargoLifter tried to build huge airships that carry up to 160 ton payload.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter
If the aircraft needs no fuel to stay aloft what is placing the limit on the range? At some point it would have to come down of course but why couldn't it stay up for 10,000 km instead of just 1000 km?
Lifting body aircraft with lighter than air gas to assist in lift has been tried before unsuccessfully. This is different in using solar power to drive the engines. With the low density in solar power I find it difficult to believe solar power is enough to keep the aircraft aloft. Perhaps that is where the range limitation comes in, there is only enough battery power + solar power to stay airborne for 1000 km.
Given the current technology in batteries and photovoltaic panels I'm tending to believe that a coal burning steam engine makes about as much sense in aircraft. I'll have to do the math but the power to weight ratios might just be comparable. I'll guess the coal burning would not go over very well with the global warming crowd. Perhaps a steam engine that burns wood, hemp, switchgrass, sugar beets, or some other biomass would be more acceptable and still keep the power to weight ratio within the same ball park as an electric battery pack.
I'm pleased to see technology like this getting some attention. I think that airships will make a comeback as energy prices rise and material science improves. I'm just a bit of a skeptic when it comes to solar power.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
caracal for the small version? a "mothership" for the vastly larger version? someones been playing EVE online.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
Depending on how the buoyancy compares to loaded weight, deadheading might be impossible. You'll have to carry huge concrete blocks on the return trip just to keep from launching yourself into space. This could lead to very low one way costs for cargo transport between certain locations.
404: sig not found.
http://www.johnmcphee.com/deltoid.htm
Why is Snark Required?
As other posters have mentioned, Helium is in more or less finite supply, and any released into the atmosphere is irrecoverable. Additionally, due to USG's selling off of their strategic reserve, it's also artificially cheap at the moment.
Unfortunately, I understand Helium to be actually essential for superconductors at the moment (and hence MRI machines, particle accelerators etc.) so any other usage (Airships, kids' party balloons, this project) is a massive waste.
Note that this is a Canadian company.
There are lots of places in Canada that have no roads or very poor quality roads. The same can be said of a number of other places around the world.
If you are moving a thousand trucks a day it is probably worth it to build a thousand miles of road to accommodate them. If you are moving the equivalent of one truck every three days to a camp that changes location every three years, it is probably NOT worth it, and a cargo airship may well be the most cost-efficient choice.
http://www.hybridairvehicles.com/
The US military is buying half a billion dollars worth of kit from them... Or rather through Northrop Grumman.
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/video-northrop-grumman-wins-race-to-revive-hybrid-airships-with-517-million-order-343259/
Deleted
Just clone Al Gore.
There's your inexhaustible supply of hot air right there.
As a robotics person, I really, REALLY, want to see autonomous variants of these. I imagine it already has some kind of GPS onboard that would be the primary means of navigation. The rest is basically a much easier version of all of the design challenges of Google's self-driving cars. You see the runway to take off/land the same way the cars see lanes on the road. You can interface with existing air traffic control infrastructure instead of dealing with the chaos of public roads.
There's absolutely no reason we shouldn't have these flying themselves all over the place carrying cargo that's normally (in the US/Canada at least) shipped via truck or rail. If the speed estimates people have come up with here based on the range are any good, shipping time would be reasonably competitive given that aircraft don't have to deal with road traffic, weigh stations, etc.
Which school is training these morons who spew out this "after the break" / "after the jump" nonsense that plagues the web these days?
$ man 8fun nuke # might contain proper commands for helping them...
Would it possible to build something like this held up by the buoyancy of hot air rather than helium?
With the right kind of insulating materials in the envelope, heat loss could be controlled. There might also be a way of using solar power to heat the air.
Stick Men
What is it doing in a storm - can it dodge by rising above?
Monorail... monoraiiilllll... MONORAIIIIIIIL!
Isn't there a helium shortage?
A fully loaded truck traveling 1000 km uses just over 4 gallons of fuel per 1000 kg it carries. 4 gallons of fuel is not going to affect the shipping price that much. Once you factor in replacing any helium lost and the salary difference between a truck driver and a pilot, I doubt this will be cheaper. Plus, the truck can travel through storms and high winds (except the most extreme examples of both) and drop off it's freight anywhere there is a road, does not need a ground crew to park, and will have minuscule amounts of maintenance & certification costs compared to an airship. No mention of what speed this will travel either, but I guess it wouldn't be very fast given it's power source.
There will probably be a niche for this, but I don't see this replacing current shipping methods much, except to very remote areas.
...although one already explored by SF authors such as Norman Spinrad in Songs from the Stars. 1000 kg weighs 2200 pounds and is basically the load of a pickup truck. By far the easiest way and cheapest way to get a load 1000 km is to build a solar powered electric railroad, especially if you don't care how fast it gets there at first. Of course, with solar collectors on the ground, there is basically no practical limit to the power you can deliver per kilogram and consequently one can get the load to destination at very high speeds with a new design.
The difficulties with a solar powered helium dirigible are manifold and have already been pointed out -- finite supply of helium, helium needed for kids' balloons and (eventually, perhaps) as thermonuclear fuel (at which time we'll kick ourselves for wasting it for decades in kids' balloons), absolutely impossible to keep sun-warmed helium inside any sort of bag. Weather and wind make the transportation dangerous or impossible (given the wimpy peak power likely to be available to move the bag -- probably inadequate to overcome even a very modest headwind). The danger of 1000 kg loads being dropped on people's heads if weather conditions exceed the limited capacity of robot brains to solve weather problems and the lifter breaks up, pops, catastrophically fails.
It isn't quite inconceivable that one could build a solar-solar system -- a solar balloon for lift, solar power for "thrust" -- although again I think that the force of wind pressure instantly will exceed the peak thrust of any onboard solar system on even a very sunny, nearly still day. To lift a metric ton you'll need a rather large balloon, so very small overpressure on the upwind side will exert a huge force downwind. And you'll still have the problems with weather, with the fact that the sun doesn't shine at night and you can't carry batteries or the whole design becomes laughably impossible, not marginally feasible (either one, Helium or hot air).
But rail? Piece of cake. Hell, you could probably deliver a steady stream of pickup truck sized loads driven by solar collectors along the roadway -- 70-100 watts per square meter of collector, plenty of room for 1000 watts per meter of actual track along the 1000 km route. In fact, the track (with a mere 12 meter wide roadway, 2 meters of which is track and vehicle) will generate anywhere from 100s of megawatts to a gigawatt of power on any reasonably sunny day. Assuming 10 kW per metric ton to move payload at 100 km/hour or better, one can move anywhere from a minimum of 10,000 metric tons up to a maximum of 100,000 metric tons per 10 hours of useable daylight day, for the amortized capital cost of the solar powered roadway. (Don't whack the math too much, these are all estimates and YMMV). The cost of the solar electrification is currently a bit over $1/watt, installation and collection will double that. Call it a $5 billion project (the cost of a couple of weeks in Iraq), build it on an existing rail corridor between (say) Detroit and Chicago square in the heart of the industrial heartland. If one charges $10/ton for transport (pretty cheap, one would think) it grosses close to $1 million/day running the rail at capacity, $300 million a year, payback of the initial investment in 15-20 years.
As is so frequently the case in solar projects, this is maddeningly close but not quite a cigar. For a billion dollar investment it would be a no brainer -- payback in 3 years (more likely 5 with operating costs), pure profit thereafter. For 2 or 3 billion dollars it is attractive -- an effective yield of maybe 5-10% on investment in the long run. For 5 it is right down there at 1-3% yield, implying a fairly long period to wait for a not-too-large ROI, plenty of risk. Drop the cost of solar cells by one more factor of two and it will happen all by itself. Drop it by a factor of four or more, which is entirely plausible given sufficient volume in the market (and this project alone would consume
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
WTF is an air distillation plant?
Normally you distill liquids, so to distill 'air' would be a cryogenic operation,.very expensive in money and energy.
I think what you mean to say is "bullshit to me," or more accurately, "neither of which I comprehend."
There, fixed that for you!
Sorry but your comments show a fair amount of ignorance of the country where this aircraft would operate, and the reasons why it is even being thought of. It's too bad that you spent so much time looking up numbers like ROI that simply don't apply here.
To build a solar-powered railway as you put it, that would reach the places in Canada that such an aircraft of this type would reach, would cost many billions of dollars more than the development of this aircraft would. Even worse, you cannot actually build a railway to these destinations. Think about huge diamond mines in the middle of the tundra. Or remote arctic communities. If we could have roads and railways to these places, don't you think they would already exist? We're talking thousands and thousands of miles of tundra and wilderness that would have to be crossed. Have you watched ice road truckers? You can't build a road on tundra. Nor could you lay track. Right now the only way in or out of these places to which this aircraft would go is by aircraft in the summer, and if it's possible to reach in the winter, by snow mobile, dogsled, or crazy ice road trucks.
This airship concept has been under study for quite a number of years. It may not turn out to be feasible. But if it is, it will be a boon to Canadian citizens living in these remote places, and to the many companies who mine natural resources in the far north.
Since this is a) a blog dedicated to geeks and b) used by geeks all over the world, do we really need metric being converted to US costumary?, especially when there is a unit that is exactly 1000kg which is close enough for most lay americans to approximate, (tonne).
Russians did a bit of R&D on Ground Effect Vehicles. They seem like a good compromise, albeit they would need docs or large plane roads to reach seas. They would be fast, close to surface and provide better fuel savings due to lower drag. I would really like to see some R&D go into them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_vehicle
Let's not forget some of the inteded applications of this. There was talk of these being used to move equipment and supplies into remote northern areas too. Rail and roads are great and all, however in Northern areas in Canada, no such option exists to get anything to these areas and are limited to ice roads in the winter time. The costs of airlifting any of these supplies cost prohibitive, or for what does get up there, almost oppressive in end user costs:
http://eyeonthearctic.rcinet.ca/en/news/canada/45-society/702-29-cheez-whiz-food-prices-skyrocket-under-canadas-nutrition-north-program
what's the Helium footprint?
but this kinda strikes me as a cross between an airplane an a barge. Another way of saying it would be it's like an airborne railroad
Both aren't as fast an an airplane, but both can carry many times as much weight and can travel a predictable distance very affordably on an item-by-item cost basis..
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
So you are replacing the limited non-renewable resource of oil, with the limited non-renewable resource of helium?
Though it would slow the consumption of oil, so it might be marginally useful.
I guess for me, is the benefit really worth the effort. You are offsetting the crappy efficiency of solar power, using the buoyancy of a limited non-renewable resource of helium, so you can burn less limited non-renewable oil basically.
This might serve as a limited stop gap measure for awhile once oil prices have skyrocketed, but I don't see much demand before that.