I would like to see pedal powered blimps. I recall reading about one in a sci-fi a while back. Ideally a compatible bicycle could just ride into a depot or whatever and attach itself directly to a stowed mini-blimp and be off. Navigation and control electronics would be a part of the blimp. and it would be solar recharged for extra oomf.

Why not have two football fields of solar panels on top of it?

It's about time companies started taking blimps seriously again. They can even use Hydrogen as a cheaper source. Yes, Hydrogen is very safe in blimps. The Hindenbergs problem wasn't the Hydrogen. Hydrogen simply burns off and doesn't burn most materials. Hydrogen ballons were shot down with anti-aircraft fire and never caught fire. The real problem was the highly flamable fabric. When the Hindenburg caught fire it was close to the ground. If a safe fabric was used the passengers would have been safe.

What is odd about their claim “They are energy efficient, expending fuel only to propel the airship, due to their inherent floating ability.”

Airships are designed to be negatively bouyant - therefore they need forward velocity to generate the additional lift to stay afloat. This is to prevent the ship from catastrophically floating away, and easier to get right than "perfect bouyancy". It also allows you to rise & then descend without venting - since the necessary volume changes with altitude and number of passengers/cargo/etc.

Electric Airships are still great idea, but the implementation is hard. I worked on a solar airship program for 4 years, and we got a 20m electric airship to fly at low altitudes. The problem lies in efficiency & brittleness of solar cells, UV degradation, and the amount of power required to generate lift and deal with the wind velocities.

But these are technical issues, not inherent physical limitations - I'm just not 100% that everything is in place yet for it to happen. Hopeful though.

ABB(and some other investors) tried this in europa a few years ago for transportation purposes... Let's put it this way: the hangar is now a subtropical waterparadise

That is pretty neat. I have been wondering for several years why there has been such a glaring absence of dirigible-style vehicles for material and passenger transport.

They are a very efficient means to transport materials by air, and the only thing I could guess that was holding them back was lack of investment because of the whole 'fear of flaming death' thing.


I hope that one of the flexible solar panel/sheet products currently in development will be ready for use on the very large surfaces that the blimp will provide.

Solar blimps, baby!



Mike J.

Super lifting power in lighter than air devices? What is lighter than hydrogen? That's simple, a vacuum. Of course, up until now, a structure containing a vacuum had to be much too heavy in order to resist the pressure of the suroundingt air.

So look at areogel. It is very slightly heavier than air and is filled with air. Its cells are not closed so normally it must contain only air. But a large block of areogel could be filled with hydrogen and completely sealed by being coated with an impermeable film of carbon nanotubes plus a sealant film. Anyway that block of areogel filled with hydrogen would float in air. And, if it could resist the air pressure, filled with vacuum (vacugel!), it would float even better, in fact almost reach outer space, at least in theory. I think we are getting close to having materials that can achieve this. Of course, vacuum is the most fireproof of all flotation media!

If you coat the outside with solar power coatings you could produce substantial power...

hi, im trying to figure out why everyone who posts here thinks solar panels are a good idea. The idea of this thing even existing as it is, - is a step in the right direction. Thats the problem with you tree huggers, you cant take anything one step at a time, you have to have it all, or do everything you can to destroy the idea. In my opinion, that thing could run on burning oak trees and baby rabbit fur, and we would still be doing a positive to the environment when compared to a 747 or c-5 cargo plane. - get real, we are talking about "lift" on an airship, and you want idiots want to add two football fields worth of solar panels to the surface of this thing. What the hell would that weigh ??

How about an individual air ship? How big would it have to be to lift 200 pounder or 500-600 lb family of four?

@ jerry,

do you have to be so insulting? NEways.

"What the hell would that weigh ??"

For panels it would weigh quite a bit, but for Solarvoltaic Paint or even inbuilt solarvoltaic fabric the question would be moot.

As to why we would want to do this, well to get the cost of use down as much as humanly possible. I've even seen some idea's floating around that incorporates retractable Wind Sails and Turbines into the design.

just looking through the archives...

Oak tree burning would be carbon neutral at least.

The main problem with vacuums AND hydrogen is getting a shell to put it in. Hydrogen is so small it will leak though virtually any substance, needing a metal shell, or to be topped off every time before it launches. It is possible today someone could make a better skin that didn't leak, but nobody I know of has.

Vacuums are almost impossible with current technology, you would need a huge volume to surface area ratio to overcome the weight of whatever was keeping it a vacuum. Also, you would need a lot of energy to get a "perfect" vacuum.

Hydrogen leaks through anything sure, but you can make it cheaply enough for top ups and the leak rates aren't particularly high. Helium [which of course is in common use] suffers the same problem and is pretty much a finite resources planet-side with estimates of a 50 year supply being quoted. It's the second most abundant element of course, but because it's inert it just floats to the upper atmosphere where it gets stripped away by solar winds.

On the solar side, there are flexible solar materials in early production runs which are supposed to be cheaper but less efficent. The benefit of these style of cells would be durability. A NZ nano technology university made some discoveries of special organic dyes that enabled lower-light solar cells as well as possible gains in efficentcy, but most importantly at 1/10 the price of traditional cells and ease of manufacture. http://www.physorg.com/news94916884.html Although it's 10 years away [at least].

There's certainly been a bit of interest of late in airships, one company has a design for one which is mostly vertical, allowing for even easier landings and moorings in cities. Size is important, because similarly to ships, the bigger they get, the cheaper they are to run and transport. They are not as fast as airliners, but if you could land 'in' a city, you might not have to travel to and from the airport as you do in many cities throughout the world.

It might be worth a note that traditional 'aircraft' are supposed to add 8% of the total of green house emissions. Airships even if powered by 'naughty' greenhouse producing means, would help reduce the burden.

Stop talking about Hydrogen. Blimps are lifted with Helium these days which is inert, ie: it has the physics (lift) but no chemistry (it doesn't react to anything)

"Stop talking about Hydrogen. Blimps are lifted with Helium these days which is inert, ie: it has the physics (lift) but no chemistry (it doesn't react to anything)"

"Blimpman" it would be awesome if before posting you would read what people are talking about. We have a finite amount of Helium as Stu said we have an estimated "50 year supply" and that estimation is not based in a future earth where airships are in any form of frequent use, after a certain point helium will be for medical uses only.

So the discussion was around REPLACEMENT ideas. How do you stabilize hydrogen? I have built many Hydrogen weather balloons for cheap third world radio station antennas and we use a small easy to make hydrogen production tanks. So far (four years) the only problem has been in the production (mixing a little too much oxygen) we frequently have people shooting at them and they have never exploded. Simply the gas is not compressed enough and at high altitudes there is not enough oxygen to be a problem. We use cheap Mylar bags with a life span of about a week. The areogel is an awesome idea id love to play around with it. (would need money for that I would imagine)

helium is much better than hydrogen because it is not flamreble
ie:it wount burn or explode

and it is only about an 8% diferens in lift so helium is the logical choice and with hydrogen you woud not be able to fly the air ship in stormy weather because of the risk of it geting struck with lightning.

They just had their type certification application approved by the FAA.
More here

http://www.gizmag.com/milestone-for-aeroscraft-ml866-project/9130/

I think this design has a lot of potential. Gotta get me one.