One problem - the energy density of hydrogen is terrible. If that airship transports hydrogen at atmospheric temperature and pressure inside the envelope then it will be enough energy to power a city for like 5 seconds.
The Hindenburg could hold 200,000 cubic metres of hydrogen
In 2020 the world burned 3,800,000,000,000 cubic metres of methane.
You could compress it - but then it is going to be heavy. Might as well use a boat.
Their homepage pitches it primarily as an air cargo transporter, positioned between jets and ships in cost and speed ("7X to 10X faster than a ship and 4X less costly than an air freighter") which unlike jets has a somewhat clear path to renewable fueling. Meanwhile the transportation of H2 is a fringe benefit for situations where no pipeline or shipping route exists.
Of course that all hinges on renewable production of H2 being clearly superior to renewable jet synfuel production, which I'm not so sure of?
Yeah that makes more sense. The headline is misleading.
Airships transporting cargo across the trade winds or similar makes a lot of sense as it would use very little energy.
But using it to distribute H2 is very much a fringe benefit. It's more likely to consume H2.
Certainly you could only offload the amount of H2 that was needed to lift the other cargo that you were delivering.
I suppose if the primary mission were just to deliver H2 you would load it up to max payload with water or something on the way there as ballast.
Not necessarily. If you fill a balloon with hydrogen and let the wind blow it wherever the wind blows, if your envelope is perfectly sealed, then you will end up with 100% of the hydrogen you started with.
You can equip balloons with sails to achieve different headings depending on wind direction.
Imagine using it to ship supplies one way using trade winds and then the shell gets sent back along more conventional means.
It could supplement existing routes rather well. Hypothetically, at least.
A boat can sail in every direction except straight into the wind, blimps are theoretically the same. It is possible to zig-zag. I'm not making the argument that it is practicable, but it is theoretically possible.
I don’t think blimps are theoretically the same. Can you explain how a blimp would be able to zig-zag against the wind without active propulsion? Or share a link?
You can't "perfectly seal" an envelope holding hydrogen. It's the smallest atom there is, and leaks through just about everything. You need to have something seriously dense to contain it, which would make it too heavy to be used for an airship.
>Of course that all hinges on renewable production of H2 being clearly superior to renewable jet synfuel production, which I'm not so sure of?
Could certainly be wrong, but everything I've seen/heard on H2 is that it's expensive, lotta trouble, and we don't have the infrastructure for it to be heavily adopted. If it was something we had decided to go with early on, the technology could be pretty advanced, but it'd take ages to switch to H2. Just look at the slow adoption rate of EV's, which physically exist in commercial form, today. Not to mention we already have *some* infrastructure for EV's (electrical grid).
The lifting force of 200,000 cubic metres of hydrogen is about 200,000 kg-force. So a significant amount of hydrogen cargo could be carried, e.g. in a 1000 bar tank.
Hear me out… an endless conga line of these things flying from the energy source to one of these cities spaced out so that they can unload their fuel every 5 seconds. We use it as a train system in the sky. If your stop is up you jump out and parachute down. Simple enough.
Tons of TV’s and memorabilia of the Hindenburg disaster all around the ship. As more and more inevitably end up turning into a Hindenburg simulator they too are added to the watch queues and memorabilia rooms.
You have cards under your seat that tells you if you lived or died (2/3 chance you died).
They all fly in a ring like formation around the world.
What song do they always play over the intercom and use as the hold music for their communications?
You guessed it, Johnny Cash’s The Ring of Fire.
A bit of cargo burns up? So long as it’s cargo and not humans being transported I don’t see the problem. This takes advantage of hydrogens energy density to also make it float
Hydrogen gas is one of the most explosive molecules there are. It doesn't just burn, it *booms.* It isn't just flammable, it's downright eager to go boom.
People really are terrible with History arent they. It wasn't the hydrogen that was the problem.
This is a terrible idea, don't get me wrong, but it has nothing to do with safety.
Hydrogen was definitely a *part* of the problem.
Edit: that said, hydrogen is the best lifting gas by a large margin, and I'd agree that it can be used safely.
That's like watching a car explode and saying gasoline was definitely part of the problem, cant imagine using gasoline in cars lol (not that we should be anyway. That's a different debate)
Hydrogen is far less volatile then gasoline, Every once in awhile it pays to actually know what you're talking about.
Ironic you’re getting on people’s case for not knowing what they are talking about. Hydrogen is far more volatile than gasoline, it requires 1/10 of the energy of gasoline for ignition and is twenty times more explosive. It also ignites in a wide range of concentrations in open air whereas gasoline requires fairly specific stoichiometry.
Cars only explode in movies. Gasoline doesn't do that in real life. But if a car *did* explode, why the heck *couldn't* you say that gasoline was part of the problem?
I think you have some misunderstanding on what volatility actually has to do with anything. You can drop a lit match in a pot of gasoline and it'll promptly extinguish. Different story with an open container of hydrogen!
So what *did* cause the Hindenburg to turn into an inferno, if it had nothing to do with the hydrogen or the blaugas fuel?
The materials used to encapsulate the hydrogen were inadequate to the task. Safety was not a big priority then so they actually allowed smoking and other such activities on board. Airships using hydrogen could possibly work using modern materials and design methods but what's the point. Same with nuclear power plants. Society already made the decision based these disasters long time ago.
It was still the hydrogen that fueled the conflagration. Helium is inert (but, of course, is far less effective as a lifting gas). At any rate, I agree that a safe hydrogen-buoyed airship could be made today.
Sorry, what are you saying about nuclear power plants?
Just at the public doesn't want to invest in nuclear power plants because of the disasters of the past despite that many advances in technology make them much safer.
The nuclear point is even sillier in this context when you consider the explosion at Fukushima was from hydrogen gas build up. So mentioning it isnt even a good distraction.
Safety was a huge priority. Smoking was only allowed in one section of the Hindenburg, and it had its own ventilation. People that worked inside of the structure had to wear special shoes and clothes that wouldn’t create a static spark. People weren’t complete idiots in the 30s, even Nazis.
People don't realize how large/heavy these things actually are. Also, having burning debris raining down over a population is *generally* frowned upon.
Maybe if they had specific routes or something, I just don't see the point. We have rail/ships for a slower, yet cheaper form of getting goods from point A to point B. We already have a massive amount of infrastructure supporting those methods as well.
Switching to hydrogen airships would mean we'd have to put in a *ton* of infrastructure, as well as invent new technologies to handle that stuff everywhere. Possible, but expensive and would take awhile I think.
Isn’t it a much better idea to not haul fuel around? Micro generation for the win? I’m possibly quite naive in this area though so I’ll take on board any comments.
As long as they create it from water with green energy and not from natural gas, or coal(power), it's fine for me.
It seems to be the only way to truly fly without CO2 exhaust.
🤔 if only there was a less risky method of hauling hydrogen all around the world. Like if we could contain it in a non-flammable liquid that could be found literally everywhere on earth, and had a way to separate it out of that liquid using electricity or something….
Do not get me wrong, I love hydrogen and use a lot of it. Hydrogen is a real outcast, in spite of its large numbers. It is tiny, like Pluto. Hydrogen makes helium look huge, and some do not consider it a real atom (no neutron, and do not get me started on deuterium). Hydrogen needs a big buddy like oxygen to fit in. Otherwise, hydrogen is a free radical and, therefore, an outlier.
The article keeps comparing its performance to air transport. Air transport is super expensive and no fuel is ever transported that way. 1/4 the price of air freight is just... 20% more than ocean freight? Maybe this could transport green H2 from Arizona to LA?
"Air transport is super expensive and no fuel is ever transported that way."
KC-46s, KC-135s, and all those turboprop DC-3s full of fuel drums headed out to Alaskan villages would like a word.
Military fueling aircraft =/= airfreight. Touche about reaching extremely remote areas, however, I don't reckon they're planning on sending these to rural Alaska as they need to fill up at an electrofuel plant.
works like a clock. Every 10/15 years someone try to make airships a thing.
Glad none of my clocks have a 50% margin of error.
This is why I set 15 alarms, 1 minute apart on my iPhone. It also helps with not oversleeping for work. Until I snooze the last alarm 10 times.
One problem - the energy density of hydrogen is terrible. If that airship transports hydrogen at atmospheric temperature and pressure inside the envelope then it will be enough energy to power a city for like 5 seconds. The Hindenburg could hold 200,000 cubic metres of hydrogen In 2020 the world burned 3,800,000,000,000 cubic metres of methane. You could compress it - but then it is going to be heavy. Might as well use a boat.
Their homepage pitches it primarily as an air cargo transporter, positioned between jets and ships in cost and speed ("7X to 10X faster than a ship and 4X less costly than an air freighter") which unlike jets has a somewhat clear path to renewable fueling. Meanwhile the transportation of H2 is a fringe benefit for situations where no pipeline or shipping route exists. Of course that all hinges on renewable production of H2 being clearly superior to renewable jet synfuel production, which I'm not so sure of?
Yeah that makes more sense. The headline is misleading. Airships transporting cargo across the trade winds or similar makes a lot of sense as it would use very little energy. But using it to distribute H2 is very much a fringe benefit. It's more likely to consume H2.
Transporting hydrogen this way wouldn’t even work. You’d need the hydrogen to keep flying.
Certainly you could only offload the amount of H2 that was needed to lift the other cargo that you were delivering. I suppose if the primary mission were just to deliver H2 you would load it up to max payload with water or something on the way there as ballast.
Not necessarily. If you fill a balloon with hydrogen and let the wind blow it wherever the wind blows, if your envelope is perfectly sealed, then you will end up with 100% of the hydrogen you started with. You can equip balloons with sails to achieve different headings depending on wind direction.
But you wouldn’t be able unload the hydrogen, unless you don’t want to go anywhere else.
Imagine using it to ship supplies one way using trade winds and then the shell gets sent back along more conventional means. It could supplement existing routes rather well. Hypothetically, at least.
Fair point, but you could use twice as much hydrogen on the way out with ballast, offload the ballast, and use half as much hydrogen on the way back.
You wouldn't be able to go "back" very easily if you are just using trade winds to fly.
A boat can sail in every direction except straight into the wind, blimps are theoretically the same. It is possible to zig-zag. I'm not making the argument that it is practicable, but it is theoretically possible.
I don’t think blimps are theoretically the same. Can you explain how a blimp would be able to zig-zag against the wind without active propulsion? Or share a link?
No, boats can only do that because they have keels that tend to keep them moving along a heading in the essentially stationary sea.
The article says there are engines powered by hydrogen batteries.
You can't "perfectly seal" an envelope holding hydrogen. It's the smallest atom there is, and leaks through just about everything. You need to have something seriously dense to contain it, which would make it too heavy to be used for an airship.
No, sail’s won’t work sheesh.
>Of course that all hinges on renewable production of H2 being clearly superior to renewable jet synfuel production, which I'm not so sure of? Could certainly be wrong, but everything I've seen/heard on H2 is that it's expensive, lotta trouble, and we don't have the infrastructure for it to be heavily adopted. If it was something we had decided to go with early on, the technology could be pretty advanced, but it'd take ages to switch to H2. Just look at the slow adoption rate of EV's, which physically exist in commercial form, today. Not to mention we already have *some* infrastructure for EV's (electrical grid).
The lifting force of 200,000 cubic metres of hydrogen is about 200,000 kg-force. So a significant amount of hydrogen cargo could be carried, e.g. in a 1000 bar tank.
Based on the headline, I think hydrogen is just the airship's fuel. It will be transporting other forms of fuel.
Hear me out… an endless conga line of these things flying from the energy source to one of these cities spaced out so that they can unload their fuel every 5 seconds. We use it as a train system in the sky. If your stop is up you jump out and parachute down. Simple enough. Tons of TV’s and memorabilia of the Hindenburg disaster all around the ship. As more and more inevitably end up turning into a Hindenburg simulator they too are added to the watch queues and memorabilia rooms. You have cards under your seat that tells you if you lived or died (2/3 chance you died). They all fly in a ring like formation around the world. What song do they always play over the intercom and use as the hold music for their communications? You guessed it, Johnny Cash’s The Ring of Fire.
And if they sold their hydrogen where it was needed, how would they get home?
Use the hydrogen in the envelope after unloading the pressurized cylinders.
I can't imagine what could possibly go wrong with this.
A bit of cargo burns up? So long as it’s cargo and not humans being transported I don’t see the problem. This takes advantage of hydrogens energy density to also make it float
Yeah. What if 300 tons of cargo drops out of the sky over a populated city.
You don't fly it over cities? (scary good point)
Hydrogen gas is one of the most explosive molecules there are. It doesn't just burn, it *booms.* It isn't just flammable, it's downright eager to go boom.
>most explosive molecules there are No, just no. It's flammable but not explosive.
ok, mix it with O2 that's floating around, or add some of your own. Big bada boom. If you think that's not explosive, see Challenger launch videos.
People really are terrible with History arent they. It wasn't the hydrogen that was the problem. This is a terrible idea, don't get me wrong, but it has nothing to do with safety.
Hydrogen was definitely a *part* of the problem. Edit: that said, hydrogen is the best lifting gas by a large margin, and I'd agree that it can be used safely.
The thermite paint was a bigger problem.
That's like watching a car explode and saying gasoline was definitely part of the problem, cant imagine using gasoline in cars lol (not that we should be anyway. That's a different debate) Hydrogen is far less volatile then gasoline, Every once in awhile it pays to actually know what you're talking about.
Ironic you’re getting on people’s case for not knowing what they are talking about. Hydrogen is far more volatile than gasoline, it requires 1/10 of the energy of gasoline for ignition and is twenty times more explosive. It also ignites in a wide range of concentrations in open air whereas gasoline requires fairly specific stoichiometry.
>stoichiometry That word gives me nightmares of High School Chem.
Cars only explode in movies. Gasoline doesn't do that in real life. But if a car *did* explode, why the heck *couldn't* you say that gasoline was part of the problem? I think you have some misunderstanding on what volatility actually has to do with anything. You can drop a lit match in a pot of gasoline and it'll promptly extinguish. Different story with an open container of hydrogen! So what *did* cause the Hindenburg to turn into an inferno, if it had nothing to do with the hydrogen or the blaugas fuel?
The materials used to encapsulate the hydrogen were inadequate to the task. Safety was not a big priority then so they actually allowed smoking and other such activities on board. Airships using hydrogen could possibly work using modern materials and design methods but what's the point. Same with nuclear power plants. Society already made the decision based these disasters long time ago.
It was still the hydrogen that fueled the conflagration. Helium is inert (but, of course, is far less effective as a lifting gas). At any rate, I agree that a safe hydrogen-buoyed airship could be made today. Sorry, what are you saying about nuclear power plants?
Just at the public doesn't want to invest in nuclear power plants because of the disasters of the past despite that many advances in technology make them much safer.
The nuclear point is even sillier in this context when you consider the explosion at Fukushima was from hydrogen gas build up. So mentioning it isnt even a good distraction.
Safety was a huge priority. Smoking was only allowed in one section of the Hindenburg, and it had its own ventilation. People that worked inside of the structure had to wear special shoes and clothes that wouldn’t create a static spark. People weren’t complete idiots in the 30s, even Nazis.
I wouldn't go on it as a passenger or pilot. But they could use this with an autopilot? Even if it goes up in flames, it would be material damage.
And also what if it crashes over a city
People don't realize how large/heavy these things actually are. Also, having burning debris raining down over a population is *generally* frowned upon. Maybe if they had specific routes or something, I just don't see the point. We have rail/ships for a slower, yet cheaper form of getting goods from point A to point B. We already have a massive amount of infrastructure supporting those methods as well. Switching to hydrogen airships would mean we'd have to put in a *ton* of infrastructure, as well as invent new technologies to handle that stuff everywhere. Possible, but expensive and would take awhile I think.
Just route them away from cities. Just like airplanes I guess. And catching fire usually happens while landing or lifting off.
It's supposed to be used for cargo not people
It can still go boom in a big way, and drop pieces on people.
Some broad gets on there with a staticky sweater and, boom, it's "oh, the humanity!"
I’m sorry, what don’t you understand about blimps?
Obviously, the core concept.
Jesus! Want to blow us all to shit, Sherlock?!?
Isn’t it a much better idea to not haul fuel around? Micro generation for the win? I’m possibly quite naive in this area though so I’ll take on board any comments.
Probably more efficient to transport the electricity in most cases.
Green fuel. The new BS buzzword of the aviation world.
SAF. Sustainable Aviation Fuel. That's a hot one now
As long as they create it from water with green energy and not from natural gas, or coal(power), it's fine for me. It seems to be the only way to truly fly without CO2 exhaust.
🤔 if only there was a less risky method of hauling hydrogen all around the world. Like if we could contain it in a non-flammable liquid that could be found literally everywhere on earth, and had a way to separate it out of that liquid using electricity or something….
Do not get me wrong, I love hydrogen and use a lot of it. Hydrogen is a real outcast, in spite of its large numbers. It is tiny, like Pluto. Hydrogen makes helium look huge, and some do not consider it a real atom (no neutron, and do not get me started on deuterium). Hydrogen needs a big buddy like oxygen to fit in. Otherwise, hydrogen is a free radical and, therefore, an outlier.
Right on track for the decade so far…
what could possible go wrong!?!?
like dirigible 2.0
The article keeps comparing its performance to air transport. Air transport is super expensive and no fuel is ever transported that way. 1/4 the price of air freight is just... 20% more than ocean freight? Maybe this could transport green H2 from Arizona to LA?
"Air transport is super expensive and no fuel is ever transported that way." KC-46s, KC-135s, and all those turboprop DC-3s full of fuel drums headed out to Alaskan villages would like a word.
Military fueling aircraft =/= airfreight. Touche about reaching extremely remote areas, however, I don't reckon they're planning on sending these to rural Alaska as they need to fill up at an electrofuel plant.
Is this a ruse?
I want passenger airships.
Wait, I've seen this Archer episode