This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Can't Americans make a flying coal-burner to fight this green abomination?!
High-altitude winds between 1,640 and 3,281 feet (500 and 10,000 meters) above the ground
So y'all will have in depth conversations about the meaning of the colors of a fucking Labubu with ChatGPT, but can't be bothered to ask it to do the math on this?
Cause 10,000 meters isn't 3,281 feet.
They accidentally added a zero, it's supposed to be 1000m (doubke 500m).
Super cool!
...But helium, so not super scalable, right?
They could make it hydrogen, for extra fun when one fails around all that electricity...
The fact that helium is such a rare, irreplaceable, and scientifically useful material makes it wild to me that we use it to fill kids' party balloons.
Tom Scott visited the US National Helium Reserve and talked to the field manager of the facility. According to him, it's not that big of a deal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8
(Relevant bit starts around 2:58)
It's not even being collected at the source (natural gas deposits) because it's too cheap to be worth the extraction. This is because of the US liquidating its strategic reserve that it had been holding since the age of Zeppelins.
Also for unmanned aircraft, using helium instead of hydrogen is just crazy
Also for unmanned aircraft, using helium instead of hydrogen is just crazy
Is it? Hydrogen is about half the mass of helium, but the trick is what you're displacing to generate lift.
1 cubic meter of air is around 1.2 kilograms, depending on a variety of factors.
1 cubic meter of helium is around 0.18 kilograms, displacing the atmosphere to generate about 1.02 kilograms of lift.
1 cubic meter of hydrogen is around 0.08 kilograms, displacing the atmosphere to generate about 1.12 kilograms of lift, a shade under a 10% increase over helium.
That can be significant, depending on other engineering constraints; but is it "crazy" different?
(Numbers will vary with temperature and pressure, back of envelope calculations, etc. etc.)
H2 being 10% more lift while 500% cheaper still makes it the choice. A H2 economy is the path to 100% renewable energy, with a transportable fuel that in a fuel cell is also much more efficient than combustion engines/turbines. Lifting gas, chemicals, agriculture, rocket fuel, all of the existing uses for H2 is just icing on the cake.
True, I hadn't considered the economic angle at all!
0.18 to 0.08 is a gigantic difference, less than half the weight per cubic meter of displacement !!
Not only is cost an issue, but the larger the volume of displaced air, the bigger the dirigible, the harder it becomes to move through the atmosphere, more friction, more air resistance etc..
Fair points, I hadn't considered the economic side of it; or even the mass beyond how it affects lift.
There are two grades of helium wells in terms of purity. Medical and kids' parties.. so that's why it's is still used for balloons.
Good news, it’s not that rare that that would make a difference. There’s plenty of it, just need different extraction techniques to further up the supply (unfortunately, that’s fracking lately iirc)
Hydrogen wouldn't burn inside the balloon, because there's no oxygen. If a fire started on the surface of the balloon, then it doesn't really matter if it's helium or hydrogen. Hindenburg would have happened no matter what it was filled with. IIRC, there's an argument out there that hydrogen actually saved people in that case, though I don't remember the physics of it all.
There's some safety issues involving working with it on the ground, but you can mitigate that with procedures. Helium has an asphyxiation risk, especially when you're working with enough to fill a blimp, so it's not like it's totally safe there, either.
Historically, the really bad thing with blimps/dirigibles is how the ground crew can get thrown into the air when they're holding it down with rope and a gust of wind suddenly picks up. Hard to find numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's more deaths involving ground crew operations of dirigibles than the 35 people who died on the Hindenburg.
I'm pretty sure Hindenburg would have been able to land somewhere instead of crashing out of the air if it used Helium. The surface catching fire wouldn't spread nearly as quickly as the cells exploding with hydrogen gas. I'm not sure what material the cells were made out of, but I doubt it burns like flash paper.
Could you use hot air? It might require some of the energy being generated be consumed, but its much more sustainable.
So it's a 100kW generator and you would need around 60kW to float the weight of a hot air balloon basket with a couple of people. My math is probably way off though.
Cool. A couple of decades ago I read about former astronaut/physics prof Wubbo Ockels working on something like that but with kites. I've never heard of any production version of that coming off the ground. I hope this does better.
As cool as this is, I"m also super interested in what happens ~~if~~ when the cable breaks.
Same as if you let go of a kite. It'll just tumble back down to Earth over some distance.
Pretty sure they have more than one cable on this thing.
Ok.
As cool as this is, I"m also super interested in what happens if when the cables breaks.
Like, how far will it go? A hundred kilometers? a thousand? Ten thousand? I just imagine one of things getting lose and it circling half the globe.
Interesting concept, but the efficiency compared to standing turbines needs to be calculated based on the expected lifetime. What's the leakage rate of the helium? What's the resistance of the fabric (or whatever it’s made of) and cables to UV light ?
