Aeroscraft - huge helium filled airship. Is is feasible?

Cue the CargoLifter debacle: CargoLifter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

They never built a ship, but a giant hangar in the middle of East German nowhere. Notice the people in the lower left of the picture!
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They are scrambling to find civilian uses now that all the DoD projects have been cancelled. There were plenty of articles of the various military projects in the last few years.

 

The first sentence in post one must have an error. Helium is used in airships because it is lighter than air. Compressed helium is heaver because there is more of it. Laws of boyancy work in fluid mediums like water and air. Scuba divers know that a tank of air at 2,000 lbs./sq.in. is heavier than a tank with no pressure.

Blimps are without a rigid frame. Derigibles and airships have a frame. As they get big there can be some interesting problems occur.

I believe that a large airship may have suffered from frame failure due to air shear. I'm not sure about that though.



I love this stuff. I have been thinking about submersibles the last several weeks. Just an hour ago, I was thinking about lifting bodies and ground effect.

I believe there is a future for airships. I think they have applications as tankers. I also believe they have a future as airial cranes. There is a plan (not mine)for an airborn crane that has several helicopter engines. That ships plan is to float to where the heavy lifting is needed, then start up the big motors and rotors.


If I were to do something like this, I would try some other thoughts. When you put all those eggs in that one really big basket, the basket gets to be a handfull.

 

Fascinating...

 

Depends on your definition of "soon"... I've been following this concept for nearly 15years and it doesn't seem any closer today than it did when I started looking at it



(I wanted to lift and move bulky, heavy equipment.)

The Cargolifter design was essentially a blimp with a full length keel - the same length as the Hindenburg but with a larger diameter envelope. It had a target lifting capacity of 160t and managed buoyancy through the traditional ballast approach (would take on 160t of water when discharging the cargo).

The Aeroscraft is different in two main ways - it is a lifting body design (hence "Aero" in the name) as opposed to a blimp, and it manages buoyancy by adjusting the volume of the helium envelope (by compressing it to reduce lift or allowing it to expand to increase lift).

Some of the people behind the Cargolifter are involved in the Aeroscraft.

As mentioned above - it is not an error but one of the operating principles of the craft. Most of the lift is from helium at atmospheric pressure (the rest is aerodynamic or thrust) and this component is adjusted by changing the amount of atmospheric pressure helium.


Fun fact:
1m³ of helium will lift 1kg. So to lift 50t the envelope needs to contain 50,000m³ in excess of the volume required to support the craft itself.

The Cargolifter CL160 proposal had an envelope design volume of 550,000m³ (550t carrying capacity) to enable a payload of 160t (giving the CL160 an unladen weight of 390t - essential the maximum take-off weight of a 747).
To visualise this design the envelope would have been approximately the same size as a Panamax cruise ship

 

I read somewhere that during WW1 when dirigibles were in vogue and a non-ridged example came in to being, a British officer labeled it, " Airship Type B,limp." I thought that I would add something really scientific. Dirigibles are good vehicles until a high wind arrives.

 

Compressed helium would not be used for lift, but it could be used for ballast, reaction control, and refilling the lift sacks to make up for leakage. Helium is a pain to seal in, because those little molecules go through any microscopic opening at all. Compressed helium will nearly always leak at some rate, depending on storage medium.

Launch vehicles and satellites often use compressed helium, at pressures up to 8000 psi, for reaction control. We blew up an 8000 psi helium bottle testing Upper Stage Flight Experiment at Orbital's Chandler facility and were lucky the three guys nearby were not killed. Only one broken arm. Faulty pressure gauge.

When we dropped GBU-15s with live 2000 lb warheads, the only thing left would be the 8000 psi helium bottle used for cooling the IIR seeker. Had one on my desk for years from the first live drop of an IIR GBU-15 I dropped and guided during OT&E.