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Helium Dreams

• nefitty 11y ago
  FYI: This is not about getting high on helium, it's about airships.
  • furyofantares 11y ago
    So, getting high on helium.
• acjohnson55 11y ago
  I haven't read the whole article yet, but I tried to do a quick search for whether it mentions our helium resourcing problem [1], but couldn't find that mentioned. [1] http://www.wired.com/2015/07/feds-created-helium-problem-thats-screwing-science/ http://www.wired.com/2015/07/feds-created-helium-problem-tha...
  • yomly 11y ago
    For argument's sake, say we have 1000 (high estimate) active cargo airships in the world. To further simplify the problem, let's assume they all have the same volume as the Dragon Dream (17,000m^3)[1]. So 1000 airships would take up 17,000,000m^3 of gas - less than 10% of current global consumption of helium (180,000,000m^3 pa [2]. Yes, this is grossly oversimplified (e.g. how often do airships need to replenish their lifting gas?) and yes we should be concerned about a major growth industry dependent on a scarce resource. On the other hand, is this a price worth paying considering the possible benefits to society it could bring via delivery of goods/aid to hard to reach areas and a reduction in fuel intensive cargo planes? [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Dream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Dream [2]http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/27/what-great-helium-shortage/#5921f6ea7c69 http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/27/what-grea...
    • adambard 11y ago
      The Dragon Dream is "half the size" of the latest model, which may not be a good benchmark. The largest airship aeros is building is quite a lot larger: > And the ML86X will be nine hundred and twenty feet (nearly three football fields) long, two hundred and fifteen feet (more than the Tower of Pisa) high, three hundred and fifty-five feet (two Boeing 747s) wide, and able to carry five hundred tons. That's 8.329×10^6 m^3 [1] each. That five hundred tons, by the way, is on the order which the logistics expert quoted claimed would be required for airships to be viable. So instead of 1000 dragon dreams, that's 2 ML86Xs. But before total helium depletion is a problem, this whole venture is predicated on airships providing cost-effective transport when compared to planes -- that seems unlikely to hold up if helium prices rise thanks to the proliferation of mammoth airships like this one. [1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(4%2F3)+*+pi+*++920+*+215+*+355+cubic+feet+in+litres http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(4%2F3)+*+pi+*++920+*+2...
  • LouisSayers 11y ago
    At $35/litre this could get expensive pretty fast!
    • Animats 11y ago
      It does. That's what killed Silicon Valley's airship, the Zeppelin 2 operated by Airship Ventures. The price of helium doubled, and airship sightseeing was no longer cost effective. That was a nice airship, too; much more maneuverable than the old ones. It's hard to contain helium, especially when you have to do it with a ballonet that's severely weight-limited. Helium tends to slip between the molecules of thin materials.
• searine 11y ago
  >Helium Airships Sure. Great idea. Make a vehicle dependent on a rare non-renewable resource.
  • ItsDeathball 11y ago
    It seems to have worked out okay for every other aircraft in existence.
    • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      There's more petroleum and/or metal available than helium, though.
  • LouisSayers 11y ago
    Except you're not burning it and turning it into something else. You can reuse it. It may not be renewable, but it is reusable.
    • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      Except for leaks...
    • marcosdumay 11y ago
      Once helium gets on the atmosphere, it evaporates away from Earth.
    • mannykannot 11y ago
      Unless you can substitute an equal-weight return cargo or ballast when unloading, you will have to remove some of the lifting gas. If you compress it into cylinders, you will have to move them to where they are needed. That will give you ballast, but then you have to move the empty cylinders to where they are needed...
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• yomly 11y ago
  This article really gets me going - there's really nothing more inspiring for me than to see a person fighting all his life, fighting against all the odds, fighting against the status quo to make his dream a reality. I really hope Pasternak can do it!
  • gozur88 11y ago
    I remember reading about this guy more than twenty years ago. He and Franklin Chang-Diaz (who's been plugging away at VASIMR... well, for ever) get the lifetime determination award.
• ph0rque 11y ago
  Today’s airship designers share a vision: magnificent amounts of trucking going on in the sky—regular convoys of enormous airships carrying timber, coal, wind turbines, prefabricated homes, or an entire summer harvest, puttering gently along at about a hundred miles an hour, ten thousand feet over our heads. So, airships are the next container ships? Sounds intriguing. Do they emit less CO2 per mile than the container ships?
• gene-h 11y ago
  Scientific American has a great article on why airships will probably not be part of our transportation infrastructure[0]. In short the energy required to move a specified payload is about the same as that of an airplane, but the payload gets there at a much reduced speed. [0]https://web.archive.org/web/20150701151003/http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/helium-hokum-why-airships-will-never-be-part-of-our-transportation-infrastructure https://web.archive.org/web/20150701151003/http://blogs.scie...
  • gozur88 11y ago
    >And in terms of energy cost, large classical airships like the ones that flew in the 1930s are just barely cheaper than the most efficient cargo planes... This, I think, is simply wrong, though I'd be happy to look at numbers to the contrary. Unless, of course, he's trying to compare actual airships from the '30s to today's cargo planes.
• piker 11y ago
  Is hydrogen completely out of the question if these airships are unmanned? Doesn't it generate more lift? With today's technology, could an fleet of smaller, "drone" hydrogen airships be effective or is it just too difficult to prevent disaster dealing with hydrogen gas? Honest questions.
  • kirrent 11y ago
    I don't know about the safety questions but hydrogen doesn't provide too much more lift than helium. Compared to the density of air being displaced the difference between hydrogen and helium is pretty small. It goes from a mass fraction of about 25% to around 6%. Certainly an improvement, but there's only a 25% increase in buoyancy from helium to hydrogen.
    • Retric 11y ago
      The difference is more than your suggesting as you care about lifting the ship's cargo not just the ship's total mass. AKA if the air can lift 20 tons, and the ship masses 10 tons then increasing that to 25 tons is a 50% increase in cargo capacity (25-10) = 1.5 x (20-10) not a 25% increase.
      • aaron695 11y ago
        Hydrogen can lift ~10% more than Helium. Hydrogen can escape easier so I'd imagine heaver material would need to be used. Hydrogen rocks cause it's cheap. Helium is pretty expensive. Hydrogen has a PR problem. But we drive around on top of a flammable fuel quite happy so that might change.
    • mikepurvis 11y ago
      But you can make hydrogen from water and electricity.
  • mannykannot 11y ago
    At some point, I thought about hydrogen-helium mixes, but it seems that you don't need all that much hydrogen to have an inflammable mix. To address your drone question, I would have thought hydrogen would be OK for them, but I believe helium is generally used in weather balloons, suggesting that just the risks of ground handling make hydrogen more trouble than it is worth.
• notliketherest 11y ago
  Are you telling me a blimp will hold up in a storm like a plane?
• mannykannot 11y ago
  The US operated four helium-filled airships in the 20s and 30s, and three of them were destroyed by bad weather. We do incredibly better at forecasting the weather today, But it is important to remember that flammability was not the only problem with the first generation of airships.
  • gozur88 11y ago
    That's a story in itself. The Germans used airships to bomb Holland and the UK during WW I. Early in the war, before superchargers, the airships flew higher than the airplanes the allies sent to stop them. But with improvements in allied airplane engines, Germany started to take heavy losses. So they started to build a series of airships they called "height climbers". The idea was they'd drop their bombs, drop their ballast, and fly home far above allied aircraft. It worked, too, though they lost a lot of people to hypothermia and oxygen deprivation. Fast forward to the end of the war. As part of the Treaty of Versailles, the remaining German airships were divvied up among the victorious countries. What the US (and others ) got were the stripped-down airships that were never intended for normal use. These were ships designed right to the edge of simply falling apart, because otherwise they would have been destroyed by airplanes. And that's what the US used as a template to produce domestic airships. It's no surprise they broke apart in a strong wind. Zeppelin knew how to build airships, though. By 1937 the Graf Zeppelin had flown over a million miles without incident.
    • mannykannot 11y ago
      There is a further twist in that the only US rigid airship that did not crash, the Los Angeles, was built by the Zeppelin company specifically for the US Navy after WW1, in an agreement to pay down reparations. The Shenandoah may have been based on the wartime height-climbers, but I don't think the Akron and Macon were. You are right about the Graf Zeppelin being a great success, but I have wondered how much that depended on Hugo Eckener's good judgment about when and where to fly.
      • gozur88 11y ago
        The Akron and Macon may not have been copied from height climbers, but they were certainly influenced by them in the sense that the US didn't know how to build anything else. Regarding Graf Zeppelin, I have no idea how much Eckener's judgement came into play. But surely it must have braved a storm or two over that many miles.
• ph0rque 11y ago
  I wonder if you could use vacuum instead of helium for the lighter-than-air medium? That way, you just have a vacuum pump as the energy expenditure. Also, that solves the problem of the ship being too light after unloading: just let a controlled amount of air back in to make it neutrally buoyant. Edit: "The main problem with the concept of vacuum airships however is that with a near-vacuum inside the airbag, the atmospheric pressure would exert enormous forces on the airbag, causing it to collapse if not supported. Though it is possible to reinforce the airbag with an internal structure, it is theorized that any structure strong enough to withstand the forces would invariably weigh the vacuum airship down and exceed the total lift capacity of the airship, preventing flight." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship