In January of this year the web was once more flooded by a fantastically designed airship concept called aeolus. The design was part of the intermediate examination (Vordiplom) of Christopher Ottersbach for an Industrial Design Degree. What's interesting is that the concept was presented in April 2008 to the public at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Germany but somehow it got into the web and a bunch of Eco Blogs picked it up, here just two of them.
Much is not known about the thoughts that went in to the project but one thing is clear the word "Design" plays a very big role in it. It has to be understood that the concept is mainly looking good and conveys a vision. It should not be seen as an engineering prototype. Commenters on the Colorado Airship-List pointed out that because of it's shape the airship would get minimal to no aerodynamic lift in contrary to the headline of one of the blogs above. Another lister pointed out:
[The] Large hull surface area means weight, drag and superheat troubles. This design would be [...] sensitive to lateral gusts and vertical wind gradients. [...] the turning characteristics would be challenging, if not a nightmare. Plus the aerostatic pressure would be relatively high compared to conventional airships.
So even though the project might look fantastic building something that would actually fly is a different story. To learn more about the project you can check the following two websites:
One thing that the airship community should take away from this is that new airship concepts also need the right presentation and working together with industrial designers might help improving the image of airships and maybe even the looks. I will try to get a hold of Christopher Ottersbach to get more background information and hopefully more pictures. Also I would love to hear from him how he designed the Airships, which tools he used and how the airship industry can profit form his work.If you happen to know Christopher please send him here maybe he can post a comment or join a discussion on the Forums.
I just received this rather unusual airship design from Darin Selby asking me to put it on the blog so that others could critique it. So please do so, go to Darins website and check out the airship design. Then come back to the Blog and leave you comments or write in the Forum. In the meanwhile we are trying to get more information from Darin about the design.
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There have been many ideas on how to use airships, may it be as mobile camera platforms either remote controlled or manned, for sightseeing flights, as high altitude platform, as aerial cruise ships or business yachts or even as surveillance tool. Using Airships in disaster relief has not been discussed for a while but the recent disasters in China and Burma which almost coincidentally happened right around the time when the 2008 ACIDO Rocket Show and competition announced their winners changed this. The ACIDO Rocket 2008 is a graduation show and competition where students of the three schools of Industrial Design in Ontario Canada present their works. One of the Categories was Natrual Disaster and Andrew Leinonen from the Humber College with his concept called "Solarial – Mobile Power Generation for Disaster Relief" won best in category. This is how he describes his project:
Solarial is an unmanned airship that provides mobile support infrastructure for disaster relief and remote communities, generating renewable energy and supplying communications links where they are needed most. Utilizing a skin coated in thin film photovoltaics, and a reversible drive propeller/wind turbine, it delivers clean energy via tether cable. Housing a suite of telecommunications equipment, Solarial also acts as a relay station for radio and cellular telephone signals, aiding the coordination of relief operations.
While that's the mission brief for the project, the rationale behind it was to produce an airship at a modest scale, fulfilling a present need, to act as a transitionary element towards a more sustainable aerospace industry based around airships.
You can check out the presentation on the ACIDO Website which features some very nice pictures and illustrations on how the concept is supposed to work. Even more information can be found on Andrews Blog pulltheskydown.com where he talks about the Solarial Concept in more detail. What's most interesting about the Solarial concept is that it combines multiple ideas into one package. Having a quickly deployed airship that turns into a tethered aerostat that can provide energy as well as a telecommunications relay for on site communications gives new flexibility to disaster relief. The Solarial is also supposed to fly autonomously to it's destination giving humanitarian help organization a chance to call for a Solarial which will then provide the necessary base infrastructure on a disaster site. In the coming years we will hopefully see more airships being used in disaster relief especially if more people demand them, because they can be a solution to today's problems in building up infrastructure at disaster sites.
But building up infrastructure is not only a topic that is interesting for humanitarian missions the military is also very interested in using airships for their missions. Using small airships for surveillance or larger ones as communication platforms. While writing this article I remembered a project by BOSCH Aerospace called REAP (Rapid Elevated Aerostat Platform) which is a project where an Aerostat is being transported deflated by jeep to the site, and then inflated and deployed in a matter of minutes. Check out this YouTube video of the REAP System:
While the REAP Platform is mostly used for surveillance the way it is deployed is quite remarkable seeing the aerostat inflating completely by itself without any human interaction.
Another project that came to my mind is the Selsam SUPERTURBINE a project to create highly efficient wind power generators. One of the concepts also includes a blimp that is tethered and has Superturbines attached to the tether. Something that could be incorporated with the Solarial? Or what about the Magenn Windtrubine also a lighter-than-air tethered power generator. The Magenn project just recently made the first trial test with their system, we reported on it here.
The possibilities seem to be endless when it comes to envisioning the usages of airships for green power generation. We are looking forward to the future hoping to the these projects become reality.
If you know of other projects that are using airships in new and exciting ways let us know. Also I want to thank Duncan Rice, Paul Bloch and Andrew Leinonen for their input which helped me write this article.
In November we featured a post about the Stratocruiser and that designers discover airships in this article we also mentioned a site by the designer Jean-Marie Massaud his website features the picture of a great white whale like airship. Now we have kept our eyes open and here is what we found out. It seems to be a project that is not really new. Even though it seems to get attention just in the last few months as it makes it's way through the Blogosphere. The first mentions of this project seem to be in French websites as early as January 2007. One mention is from Liberation.fr (English translation here) and Cote Masion.fr (English translation here) also containing pictures. A little later in in February 2007 there was a post at 365questions.org which contains the most pictures of the Massaud Manned Cloud which are known to me. We also found a video on a site that was written in Spanish and has a copyright of 2006 (English translated version here). We uploaded the video to YouTube so that you watch is easily.
As Mentioned earlier in this posts there was quite some coverage about the airship in the last few weeks. It is supposed to be a hotel for eco tourism, able to fly 280km/h and provide 60 rooms for passengers enjoying it's 3 day cruise around the world and as many project state it could be realized as soon as next year. Considering no airship ever flew that fast it's an ambitious project. According to Modern-Airships the fastest Airship to date was the Macon with about 140 km/h this ship would have to fly twice as fast. Also having 60 rooms on 500 square meters seems like a big step, considering the Hindenburg had about that size of space. Today the largest Airship the Zeppelin NT can carry 12 passengers maximum. So this is another visionary project that we will keep looking into. But till today an airship that can match the Hindenburg, Graf Zeppelin, Akron or Macon still has to be built. So here is the rest of the Coverage about the Massaud Manned Cloud Airship. As always our friends at Aerocrat where a good source. check out their post about the Massaud Airship here (English page here) But also Bornrich.org did their homework well in their Post called "Manned Cloud by Massaud Studio – The flying eco-hotel!" they linked to a some great sources:
One last source also seems to be design-italia with their post "Maned Cloud, Jean-Marie Massaud" (English translation here). We are sure that there is more but we are also wondering how much of this is actually feasible . Right now it seems to be a dream of a designer without much of an engineering background but we love to be wrong on that. If you have more information pictures, numbers, videos anything that might be of interest post a comment or send us an email.
On October 8th the website dezeen a design magazine published a post called "Strato Cruiser airship concept by Tino Schaedler and Michael J Brown" featuring a futuristic design for a cruise airship. You can check out the original Pictures of the Stratocruiser if you go to Tino Schaedlerswebsite at http://www.tinoschaedler.com then click on "Artwork" -> "Projects in Detail" -> "Architectural/ Exhibition Design" and there you find the link to the Stratocruiser pictures. Tino Schaedler who was born in Germany is an Art Director in the movie industry and just recently was also "artdirector for digital sets" in the Movie The Golden Compass check out the Trailer here, is it just a coincidence that this movie featured an airship? And what about Stardust there was an Airship in there too. And do you remember the Blimp a final year project by Carl Hagerling from Sweden. Read our post about his design project of a swivelling blimp-envelope being vertical when landing and horizontal in flight. And just recently Johannes Eißing from the great RC Airship Regatta Yahoo Group pointed out a new site that features an Airship http://www.massaud.com/ not much is known about that site at this moment but we will do our best to find out more. If you have any information for us that that you would like to share with our readers please don't hesitate to write a comment or send us an email, your feedback is always welcome and helps us to deliver more of what you want and less of what you do not want to read. Also I would like to apologize for keeping the updates at such a low pace. There are things happening behind the scenes that I can not yet talk about but keep checking back or subscribe to the Blog and get automatic updates.
We have reported about Carl Hagerling's Blimp project in a previous post, now we have some more stuff to look at. First of a Video showing how the supposed moving of the gondola should work. Check out this YouTube video
Also there are some more pictures of the design. One must of course understand that this is a design study, not a technical project. We will tyr to get some more background information on it. But this is an innovative oncept mich might be worth a closer look.
Today I stumbled over the site Emergence Design, on it you find a collection of works, done by Master Graduates in Industrial Design from the Lund University in Sweden. One of the Works is by Carl Hagerling, he designed an airship/blimp where the gondola moves and changes the center of gravity. The description reads as follows:
the Blimp The Blimp is a helium filled airship that could by changing the centre of gravity, fly in horizontal and vertical position. This gives us an airship that is easier to maneuver and has good aerodynamics
I extracted some pictures from the press-kit, which you can check out here. (Click the images for the full size) I think the concept is very interesting, but feasibility has to be proven, also I am wondering if the size calculations and proportions are all correct. what do you as reader think, let us know. I am trying to get more information and maybe some in depth information about this project from Carl Hagerling. If we get updates they will be posted here.
