As you can see, my airship design has reached a much more advanced stage. I will be constructing a balsa/lightweight plastic 20' flight test test model in my 2 car garage over the winter. Once the airframe passes some tests not conducted in a computer generated wind tunnel then hopefully it will be on to building an even bigger one. This finished Colossus will measure 160' in overall length and 72' wide for the airframe and she'll stand 118' from the strut to the main rudder.
Powered by 12 electric 6 blade vectored thrust props which will be able to steer the craft in something like the airship version of three rectangular arducopters bolted to each other. Not only will the housings pivot to allow more stable ascent/descent, the props also pivot out within the housing to allow lateral thrust capibilities.She'll be very maneuverable, and computer testing indicates the airframe will capable of some new maneuvers previously unknown to rigid and semi-rigid airframes such as lateral crabbing, and pivoting in a full 360 ciricle on her center-point within her own shiplength while making a vertical ascent or descent. This is a design change which can enable much safer landings and take-offs in windy conditions and perhaps prevent the pilot error which led to the hindenburg diaster from ever happening again.
The connection pylons between the main hull and the flight nacelles are airfoils which have air current forced over them by the forward engines. This adds to the lift and stability of the craft allowing it to reach higher speeds than have previously been attained by similar craft, and is one of the design features which should enable it to perform some fairly impressive maneuvers once in the air.
The main hull is semi-rigid with a pressurized envelope, similar to the Zeppelin-NT, however with a different internal framing configuration (obviously such would be necessary) and the flight nacelles have a lightweight rigid configuration with semi-pressurized helium cells.
She will be able to be operated fully autonomously, remotely operated by a single pilot wile the drones operate autonomously, or the gondola can easily be reconfigured to allow a single pilot to physically control the vessel if desired. The gondola also houses the auxilliary electric generator to allow for operation in a cloudy environment or if the solar electric system fails for whatever reason.
The battery banks providing power to each of the engine-pairs are located amidships and each nacelle is independently powered and recharged. The odd pattern of the solar cells are based on the weight of the lightweight flexible amorphous panels I could find information on. That pattern represents the best weight distribution to be able to achieve independent powering.
The drone launch and recovery system, mechanically, will be very similar to the original system designed for the USS Macon, Akron, and Los Angeles. However the drones will have cradle supports which lower fore and aft (not detailed in these photos, nor is the drone fuselage configuration to enable launch/recovery)
She's carrying 8 scaled down lightweight electric versions of the MQ-1 which are recharged by the on-board solar system. The drone wingspan is 18 feet. It is capable of carry drones with up to a 24' wingspan and gross weight of 350 lbs per plane. and obviously the system could be reconfigured to accomodate smaller craft. The way it works is really cool. The craft are stored so close together that instead of having a lowering design for launch, I worked it in to the craft are stored at different distances from the hull. The fore and aft drones are stowed 7" lower than the amidships drones.
The drone launch process will have to occur in a paired sequence for balance purposes, and the thrust configuration greatly stabilizes the craft and makes her a lot easier to balance, so the stowage level only makes it easier to conduct the launch sequence and it keeps the drones closest to the most balanced point. Once all the drones are away, the launch/recovery hooks raise up into the rigid hull of the flight nacelle and are kept close to the hull to increase aerodynamics. When it is time to recover the craft, the L/R trapeze descends to its full length to allow recovery of in-flight craft after others have already bee recovered.
The on-board sensor package is pretty modular actually. You can do a lot with this airship configuration. I have hard mounted fore and aft gimbals on the main hull and amdships gimbals on each flight nacelle. The bay in the main hull is also a sensor bay and acess panel. Fuel stowage for the auxilliary generator is in wing tankage in the two airfoils and the ship will carry approximately 4-8 hours worth of fuel currently, but more fuel storage can be added.
Unfortunately the laws of physics concerning rigid and semi-rigid airships dictate that the 20' model will be able to lift it's own airframe and that's about it. I should be able to include a single mini-cam on a gimbal but that's really it. She won't be able to carry a functional payload until she's at least 80' in overall length and even then we're talking some pretty small (under 100 lb each) planes.
I'll post more photos and stuff as they are generated and more news on this project and how it's going. Till then. Happy Flying!
Comments
Very Freaking cool! iv been wanting to do the same, iv been buried in my history and engineering books while trying to come up for a design were I can launch and recover mavs ranging from fixed wing to rotor and quads. I was thinking of using fabric solar cell chargers just decked across the top and side hull of the ship, iv got another solution to charging and my inspiration of all things was a hair straightner, my only issue is recovery and launch of the fixed wing. I had been bent on a landing bay where the mav glides into something like a cargo hold (my inspiration for this was the star wars docking of spacecrafts) to me it seems probable just needs some better ideas for it, and iv got some stuff I need to work on for it. now im really curiouse what should be used for the "skin"?
No, this project hasn't stalled. I had to do a cross-country move, and am now located in the state I plan on constructing the vessel in. You will also notice a name change, as I forgot my original login info.
I've been working mostly on the designs of the full sized version, and am starting the process of raising funds for the construction of the Colossus UAV model.
Also, Linux is a little dodgy with sketchup, which is the program I used to design this vessel, and I'm now working with a new windows machine.
Sorry about the delay. Sometimes life gets in the way of our dreams. But you'll see more of me now that I've been able to get back online.
Wes, whatever happened to this project? Is it still going or has it stalled (haven't seen a post for 5 months)?
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This heats both the helium, and the air inside the ballast bladders at higher altitudes. Vents at the nose and tail open to vent the heated air from inside the ballast bladders, refilling them with cold, thereby cooling the remaining helium inside the cell. When you add wings, hot helium and hot air, you get more lift and a more stable flight requiring less power. The blast-valve assemblies would be fueled by propane or natural gas, which is also used to power the auxilliary motor in the manned drone version (the unmanned model still checks out fine using a solar power configuration) and the full size ship (I'm also playing with the idea of channeling heat produced by the engines into the lifting cell heat exchangers in the full-size ship, which is designed to be powered by 12 Rolls Royce M250 turboshaft motors (they're the lightest weight/horsepower ratio I could find...(350 to 720 horses with only 173 pounds?!) . The drone carrier shouldn't need the additional hot-air to achieve it's lft as it would only be carrying about 2/3 it's designed payload working as an unmanned platform. It would require the main hull to be fitted with lifting-cell heating elements to achieve it's ceiling when manned.
There is a ballast control bladder in every non-rigid and semi-rigid design. It's basically a little blimp filled with regualr air inside the bigger blimp filled with helium. As the airship rises, and the pressure of the helium decreases, air is added to the ballast bladder to maintain envelope shape. This is what helps keep the entire structure rigid without an internal frame, but it is also what has limited airship altitude. The concept of pressurizing the helium inside the bladder too add lift is somewhat the same concept of a half-filled helium balloon to a fully inflated one ...they may look the same, size-wise, but one is hard and the other soft and one will float to the ceiling while the other will only rise to a certain level. The rigid airship designs of the 30's had non-pressurized gas cells that you could almost sleep on. They could have had more helium/hydrogen in them, but the gold-beaters skin they were made of couldn't stand the pressure. You can fill a space to only the volume permitted by the materials the container is made of. If you have a stronger container, you can have more gas in the same space.
Modern airship envelopes can be as hard as a two by four, and semi-rigid envelopes provide most of the structural support. This is how the Zeppelin NT can carry the weight it is capable of carrying at the size that it currently is. Structuarally it has the same level of support that the larger Zeppelins did but with less than a quarter of the framing. (Same strength with MUCH less materials). To achieve the same lift with a non-pressurized rigid design, one would need a vessel twice the size simply because of the weight of the framing versus the volume and pressure capacity of the goldbeaters cells.
Neutral buouyancy is the base-line you're aiming for in airships. While a hot-air balloon is capable of "hovering" without any additional thruster controls, just moving the ballast-bags around a bit and hitting the blast-valve every now and then, and airship must be making some forward momentum or it slowly begins to descend. The Hindenburg could only "hover" at altitudes of 60 feet or less which is the same altitude that the engines were engaged during take-off procedures...not very high at all. Every airship in existence save for the hot-air airships of recent years does that.
In fact, this design will be just about balanced between lift and weight. My design incorporates two additional lifting elements. One, the wings... The airfoils appear to wash away much of the boundary layer at the wing-tip vortices along the low-aspect-ratio surface of the hulls thereby reducing drag. Less drag means less power required to move. They also add lift while in motion and can enable to vessel to launch when heavy. This wouldn't be the first airship design capable of doing that...There are several in development currently all of which are capable of take-off while heavy. Aireon is still in business and they are producing something that looks like a half-breed between a blimp and a stealth bomber that only uses the helium to add lift, the craft itself is something of a LTA "airplane" and is quite heavy considering that it is a helium semi-rigid. It's called the Aireon26.
The other added element, which was attempted to be incorporated in the original Aireon III is heated cells. Each lifting cell will have a lightweight duralumin heat exchanger tube running along the length of the inside of the cell. When the cell is "plugged in" to the frame, blast-valves mounted to the frame (with two elements in each blast assembly, one forward and one aft to reduce the weight of additional blast assemblies for a total of 4 blast assemblies [with 8 blast nozzles] in the manned drone carrier and 48 blast assemblies between all three hulls in the full-sized ship) are pointed inside the heat tubes. This heats both the helium, and the air inside t
Lift comes from buoyancy when an object with less density than its surroundings resides in a column of air or fluid. All that matters is the displaced volume of said substance. You say a high pressure helium cell produces more lift than a low pressure helium cell by placing more helium in a certain volume, but I don't see how that follows.
An ideal lifting cell would be massless, or an impossibly strong sphere enveloping a vacuum, somehow still capable of resisting the outside pressure crushing it. Adding anything inside (as we practically must in the real world, be it hydrogen, helium, or a heated gas) adds to the mass and reduces the difference between the mass of the cell and the mass of the displaced outside medium, thus reducing the lift being produced. Pressurize the cell enough and it would have enough helium inside to weigh as much as the surrounding medium, eventually being neutrally buoyant!
Other than that, nice ideas and interesting details. Can an airship have a swim bladder like some fish do, to vary their buoyancy by compressing a lift cell or having an internal cell withing the pressurised main envelope, that you could compress full of ambient air to reduce the volume of the lighter-than-air portion of the airship? That would enable the airship to descend without any venting, with the cost of carrying beefy airpumps capable of compressing air into the bladder against the increasing pressure from the simultaneously compressing lifting gas.
Here's a picture of the Aireon III docked at Mercer County Airport in 1966 shortly before this last model was scrapped. You can see where there were some great ideas and where some ideas needed improvement without even looking too close.
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hot-air balloon blast-valves to add lift at higher altitudes. It never got off the runway because it flipped over on it's back when the wind caught it broadside. The Aireon's nacelles were permantently connected with a single giant airfoil running the length of the ship which was worked into the overall framing structure (it's a pretty impressive design in it's own right considering the era in which it was produced) but the original proof of concept production design was grossly underpowered and had the props placed around the hull as if it were a single hull design (neither acknowledging or taking advantage of the changes in the way the laws of physics relate to that hull configuration).
That was the design flaw. Mathematically, the craft should have been capable of greater speed and altitude than its single hull cousin, but the airfoil frame design flaw connecting the three nacelles was never able to be corrected and the project scrapped in 1965 as it would require too much additional research effort to make workable at the time and the Vietnam War took money elsewhere to other projects which required less development and were basically ready for production. It's one of the reasons we got the F-14 Tomcat's first flight in 1970 rather than in 1978.
The UAV Version (Colossus) can be built in any of the existing facilities without adding any hangar units (there are still even a few remaining unused large airship hangars around the country and on a few military bases) and could even be constructed in a hangar designed for large commercial aircraft (such as those for 747's).
Both the Colossus and the Leviathan's flight nacelles separate from the main hull to allow the entire unit to be hangared without designing any new styles of airship hangar. It also means that concerns raising from the idea of mooring a very wide airship outside can be dismissed as you would be mooring 1 large airship and 2 smaller airships as individual units rather than one gigantic thing. The Leviathan will have retractable nacelles as well to allow for a narrower bow profile at lower altitudes and slower speeds. The nacelles extend for high altitude/ high speed operations and launch/recovery operations.
The existing Goodyear Blimp hangar in Akron is what is left over from the construction of the Akron and Macon airships in the 1930's. The buildings shape has been described as "half a silkworm's cocoon, cut in half the long way." It is 1,175 feet long, 325 feet wide, and 211 feet high, supported by 13 steel arches. There is 364,000 square feet of unobstructed floor space, or an area larger than 8 American football fields side-by-side. It is large enough to construct the main hull within. It would take 2 hangars to build and store the thing. 1 for the main hull, the other for the 2 flight nacelles. But again, no new hangar designs are needed, only a couple of copies of hangars that we have already built before. (This slices through production costs like a knife compared to other current large airship designs)
I'm trying to create a workable design using our existing facilities, resources and knowledge base. My hopes are that the unmanned version will get picked up by someone and developed as a proof of concept for the larger version. I'm constructing a flight model of the nacelle design to test real-world handling characteristics but everything checks out fine in the computer simulations.
This hull design doesn't include some of the cool features in other multi-hull design shapes (some of which are currently in development by aerospace manufacturers, but those with experience solely in HTA design) such as air-cushion (hovercraft) landing and ground manoeuvering pods Those were designed to compensate for the great width of the craft while on the hard which my design requires no compensation for as it can simply land to 3 masts while connected, then once all three nacells are hooked in to the 3 mobile mast trucks the nacelles can undock from the main hull and the 2 mast trucks (one for each nacelle) simply "pull" the nacelles away from the main hull and they are docked away far enough to allow a 360 "clock-count" as the surface winds shift (same concept as mooring balls in an anchorage) or simply pulled inside their hangar.
All of this could be accomplished at 40% of US airports without modifying facilities or reallocating space usage, and 100% of the US based Navy and Air Force Bases (with runway facilities large enough to acommodate a C-5 Galaxy). It would even be possible to reuse some of the abandoned Nike II facilities, retasked and rebuilt for a new post cold-war mission...all you need is the land and the giant hexagonal hardtops, you can raze the buildings to the ground and build a new one.
The last rigid airship to be built wasn't the Graf Zeppelin II LZ-130 (sister ship to the Hindenburg, dismantled in 1940) as is commonly thought but rather the Aireon III developed in the US between 1959 and 1965. It was over 200 feet long and carried a single pilot in the nosecone of the central nacelle and was fully rigid with low-pressure helium cells that were heated with hot-air ballo
985' long for the manned version? The sheds at Cardington are the biggest I know and they are 777' long, where will you build these things?
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