Russian Railways: News

Air ships deserve investment. These days we have accurate forecasting of winds in 24 hour windows. This excludes deep convection which can only be inferred as
a probability based on the surface analysis (CAPE) and the large scale circulation pattern (low pressure, static stability profiles). Any air ship requires substantial
propulsion in any case. For large air ships this is not a problem since they can carry a lot of weight.

Air ships should use hydrogen. Helium is rare and expensive. The Hindenburg burned because of the aluminum powder mixed with iron oxide powder used for the paint on the
fabric skin. This is solid rocket fuel. Static electricity will not automatically ignite the hydrogen without available oxygen.

Huge airships.
Ok but "strong winds will **** them up" u say.

Have to say I agree. For very strong winds you take off and move to less windy places till the wind dies down or you climb to an altitude where there is less wind and ride it out.

In fact plan trips in directions the strong wind is heading and use lift and ballast to maintain altitude.

Simple, cover the skin with very small ultralightweight wind power generators.

No. For the same reason they don't put wind power generators all over your electric car so you charge as you drive. The extra drag from this would increase the energy needed to drive around more than the energy it would generate. It would make more sense with an enormous vehicle like an Airship to use solar panels on the upper surface to collect electrical energy.

Airships would also be good to transport military equipment between regions.
Or high up as early warning radar stations.

An airship does not require roads or runways and could take a 50 ton water turbine complete from the factory it was made in directly to the hydro electric dam where it will operate.

You could make the underside able to land on the surface... a flat surface like open ground or water or snow and then just add enormous amounts of ballast to hold it there. It would be less vulnerable to high winds than aircraft sitting on an airport because it wont have wings that the wind can lift and roll the aircraft over and do damage. The main threat in very high winds is the damage debris can do when accelerated by high winds. In bad storms it would just make sense to dump all the ballast and climb to a safe altitude and ride it round and round...

Any air ship requires substantial
propulsion in any case. For large air ships this is not a problem since they can carry a lot of weight.

Electric motors have developed to be very powerful and efficient. Some sort of high power low weight power generation system makes sense, which would be a gas turbine which could generate heat which improves lifting performance and the engine exhaust could be captured to create water for ballast to balance the used fuel... but the fuel does not need to be kerosene... it could just be hydrogen extracted from the water ballast.

Fuel cells could also generate the electricity or use electricity to create hydrogen for lift or water for ballast.

Kevlar and nomex and carbon fibre and light strong composite materials allows light fire proof strong structures to be used.

You could even use the trade winds to move rather faster than most airships can move, but the key point is that they can go where you need to go without roads or rail lines, ports or air ports... whether it is the middle of the ocean for a drilling rig, or the middle of the antarctic to take fuel or supplies or a vehicle, It can go anywhere in a desert or a jungle... a rescue mission up mount everest if you need it.

Air ships should use hydrogen. Helium is rare and expensive. The Hindenburg burned because of the aluminum powder mixed with iron oxide powder used for the paint on the
fabric skin. This is solid rocket fuel. Static electricity will not automatically ignite the hydrogen without available oxygen.

Yes, a modern airship... or even an old airship was not some big tank filled with hydrogen, it was a big structure that had gas bags inside it containing hydrogen or helium and you had way more bags than you kept filled all the time so you could shift the lifting force for balance and stability.

The point is that the space between these bags was filled with normal air so crew could move around and turn taps to shift the gas around etc.

On a modern airship that could all be remotely controlled so you could purge the air between the bags of lifting gas and just fill it with an inert cheap gas like nitrogen. Nitrogen is already 70 of the atmosphere anyway, so replacing the remaining 30% would mean you could throw a dozen burning road flares in there and rip open the hydrogen bags and there would be no fire, because there would be no oxygen for a fire.

A computer could have fuel cells hooked up to these hydrogen bags and water ballast tanks to change the lift and the ballast as needed to maintain level flight and to compensate as fuel is burned and also as loads are added and removed.

Helium is enormously expensive and is not as efficient as Hydrogen as a lifting gas so I would eliminate it from the design completely... it was only used because it is inert and does not burn readily in the atmosphere.

As you point out kvs, the material the Hindenberg was made of was rocket fuel/guncotton/smokeless powder type stuff... a real hint is the movie footage of the disaster.... hydrogen burns invisibly so those yellow flames is not the hydrogen burning... obviously it was burning too, but the real problem with the flammable skin materials and light aluminium structure didn't help. The air between the hydrogen bags would also have allowed the hydrogen to burn until the air was consumed.

With fuel cell technology you have the capacity to change hydrogen from a lifting gas to a ballast in the form of water and back again, with a reliable power supply. Solar power is free, but not reliable enough and batteries are still heavy so while it will carry them, a gas turbine engine or two or three that can be used efficiently.

Perhaps a small gas turbine to run the computers and keep the air conditioning systems going, a bigger turbine that can power the electric motors and everything else at once and a second big gas turbine as a backup.

While sitting on the ground you could use the small gas turbine together with any energy from the solar panels... you will need large numbers of fuel cells but they are compact and not that heavy. This will allow you to generate lift and use up ballast or reduce lift and generate ballast quickly as needed.

If you fly to a location to pick up a heavy load like a 100 ton engine of some sort, then it will take time to attach the payload securely... perhaps even a doughnut shaped airship with the payload in the centre. While it is being secured your computer can calculate ballast and lift requirements along with which hydrogen bags need to be filled and which water ballast tanks need to be filled or emptied to enable level flight. You might also have compressed hydrogen tanks for fuel supplies for the gas turbines so the burning of the hydrogen fuel does not effect the buoyancy so much.... heat from the gas turbines generating electricity can be directed into the main envelope with the hydrogen gas bags further improving their lifting capacity.

Burning hydrogen means no CO or CO2 emissions, and when operating at low altitudes a dehumidifier can be used to collect water ballast from the air... fly through clouds to boost its capacity to take on water... which can be fuel or lifting gas or ballast weight.

Having compressed hydrogen in tanks as fuel for the gas turbines means you can run the gas turbines without using up lifting gas. Having an accident where hydrogen is released could be solved by having the compressed hydrogen in the hydrogen fuel tanks for the gas turbines vented into the hydrogen lifting bags if you need lift quickly to stop from descending too fast. You can use electricity from solar panels during the flight to convert water into hydrogen to fill the hydrogen pressurised tanks for fuel for the gas turbines... the exhaust of the gas turbines can be directed through pipes through the inside of the airship to heat the hydrogen and generate extra lift but also to cool down the exhaust fumes which are steam and can run into the ballast tanks, while the gas turbines generate power to run the electric motors and of course all the lights and heating and computers running the airship while also charging the batteries. The energy from the solar panels can be used to also charge the batteries and run everything while the sun is shining so during the day you might run on solar with the small gas turbine running and using the batteries for everything... operating above the clouds means you get the best from the solar panels during the day depending on the lattitude. At night you can run a large gas turbine to run everything and charge the batteries and also run a fuel cell to produce hydrogen which can then be compressed by a compressor and use to restock fuel.

Of course in every system there will be power losses but you could land in certain places and take on hydrogen fuel or water ballast and also charge the batteries.

You could even drop electric wires while hovering over high tension power lines and charge your batteries like a wireless charger by induction...

I don't think it will be totally self sufficient, but it should be able to be very efficient... one of the problems of the old airships is you arrive at a launch point and maybe take on 20 tons of baggage and 10 tons of people, so you have to drop 30 tons of ballast to get airborne... and then you started up diesel engines to power the airship to the destination... burning diesel fuel so as you flew you got lighter and lighter so you had to dump lifting gas on your way and then to land you had to dump even more lifting gas to "dock" and your cargo and passengers got off so you then had to reload diesel fuel and lifting gas.

The cost of using helium was prohibitive so most just used hydrogen and accepted the fire risk.

The cost of the helium meant if you had a mix of hydrogen and helium lifting gas on the airship if you had to dump lifting gas you dumped the hydrogen which was relatively cheap at the time.

These days hydrogen is the best solution.... even without fuel cells you could compress it instead of dumping it to reduce lift and decompress it into bags to increase lift. The ability to use a fuel cell and electricity to convert readily between one and the other, along with super light strong non flammable materials just makes it very very interesting...

All those ocean cruise liners around the place could be replaced by airships flying over africa or down fiords or over mountain ranges... no part of the earth would be off limits except war zones of course and volcanic eruptions etc.

Little chance of pirates robbing everyone... and you can stop anywhere you please.

Make the lower part able to land on the ground and you could set her down almost anywhere including mid ocean, or the middle of a lake, or large river.

The main problem with H2 is that it leaks through anything, including metal. But this is not so bad since more H2 can be produced from the readily available H2O.

The suggestions made by Garry highlight the wasted potential of this transport tech. People think progress is always upward. No, it is some zig-zag with regression. We
had the removal of electric tram systems in US cities in exchange for diesel buses. Air ships got shafted because of one bad incident that was fully avoidable. I do not
understand what crack the Germany engineers were smoking when they used this "silver" paint. Chemistry was fully aware of the combustion properties of this mixture
and it was not the only choice to begin with.

Of course new nano tech solutions as fabric barriers to leaking hydrogen would be very useful from pipes to bags to materials for airships... for shipping or piping all sorts of light gasses and fuels that contain hydrogen... these would be useful and valuable technologies that are worth developing. Worth spending money on.