Airships

I had a good time watching Hindeburg last night. Most of the focus was on the use of hydrogen as the gas for the balloon.

I have always wondered if you could mix expensive non flamable helium with cheap light flamable hydrogen. I did a seach on the internet and found that someone mentioned a 60/40 mix of helium to hydrogen worked well but this was on an home hobbyist website so it is unclear if they did any experiments on the viable range of ratios. I presume it depends what you mean by flamable. Still reducing the cost of helium by 40% sounds like a good saving. I wonder to what extent hydrogen would differentially leak out more than helium through the skin to. There was lots of chatter about helium being a fossil resorce to ( i.e it will run out at some point).

I made a list of the things I would like to see in my ideal airship design.

1. Helium hydrogen mix - Hydrogen can carry 30% more load per unit volume than helium so I guess the mix would be 10-20% more than helium.

2. Heat the non flamable mix with heat from the engines again we make the system a bit more like a hot air balloon. A small saving but we where going to throw the heat away anyway.

3. Meathane balder(s). Meathan is also lighter than air. I think a bladder would be less weight than a tank ( I could be wrong). Perhaps it would be a mix of cold tank with escaping methane boiling off. Makes you wonder if you could run a stiling engine with the cold part on the semi cryogentic fule tank.

4. Make the shape more likely to generate lift from forward movement. This way you can get the airship to sink when you stop. Needs clever software to make the right shape when pressureised in the envelope.

5. Like the Goodyear airships mount pivoted (or ducted) engines this way you can use them for short bursts to not only to push you up at lift off but also pull you down on landing.

6. Lots of new materials like Kevlar,Mylar and Carbon fiber.

Finally the huge crews for landing are a poor thing operationally. Perhaps we need to have a metal rope lowered from the airship and the tower to have a number of electromagnatic 'arms'. The rope goes near the arms and is held by a strong magnetic force. Once fixed the airship winches its self down until low enough for a crew member to affix a number of more conventional ropes.

Naturally the big question with a modern airship is what to do with it. Slower than an aircraft or helicoper, with difficulties in high wind. For me the natural thing to do is to take advantage of the high wind forces and use the airship as an aerostat wind turbine. The obvious think to look at is moving large hevey objects around - things beyond the lifting range of a helicoper. Some thing I think others have though of before.