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Flying Wing To Run On Sun-Replenished Fuel Cells 128

Posted by timothy from the icarus dept.
Saint Aardvark writes: "CNN reports here that a new flying wing is being powered by a combination of solar panels and fuel cells that suck up 100kWh every *day*. They hope to keep these(unmanned) babies up for six months at a time -- essentially making them cheap satellites. The $12 million price tag puts it a little out of reach for me and thee right now, but just wait 'til they get open-sourced...:-)" The question is, will this help meet my unbound desire for cheap, ubiquitous, unmetered, wireless Internet access?
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Flying Wing To Run On Sun-Replenished Fuel Cells More

Flying Wing To Run On Sun-Replenished Fuel Cells

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  • Slashdot needs all the critisism it can get (or a good kick in its pants) but this typo doesn't appear to be the slashdot crews. It's the property of the submitter of the story, unless the italicized stuff was typed in as opposed to cut and pasted.
  • Really, they need to work on quality control

    No, really they need to work on incorporating a simple spellchecker into the slash code. It would be sooo easy to do, I'm surprised some slash enthusiast hasn't done it for them. Spellcheck not just their posts, but ours too.

  • Airships (Score:5)

    by Dolohov ( 114209 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @06:11PM (#659362)
    A thought occurs to me: Since solar cells need a stable surface area, why not plaster these babies on the top of a dirigible aircraft? Without having to haul fuel, and with the electricity (to spare!) to heat a sizable cabin at high altitudes, it would be conceivable to run airships very, very cheaply.
  • The research project itself costs $12M/year. When it enters production, the flying wing itself probably will end up being cheaper.
  • Is there any way that we may be able to harness this power to use instead of our current toxic power plants? -psyiode
  • I need a beowulf cluster of AI controlled solar powered flying devices

  • Weight perhaps? I don't know how much solar panels way, but it would add weight to the airship, perhaps making it too heavy to stay up?
  • And the moderators need to realize that my post was meant to be PRODUCTIVE.... god... I am going to bed.
  • And we didn't have any bread, either.

    It's things like these that make me hate Microsoft. Such injustices in the world, and they stand by! Watching poor helpless cps (yes, we call it CPS here) eat junk food. Malnourished, it what we are! I say we strike! Fight the power!

    No CPS students wre harmed in the creation of this post.

  • Really.

    Someone BETTER be manning SOMETHING. Otherwise, I'm going to re-evaluate my homeowner's insurance...

    -- Chicken Little MIGHT be right...

  • First of all, what if it cloudy? Obviously, you would need some type of reliable backup system in place. However, if there is a way to create a reliable backup that doesn't weight as much as fuel would, it is a good idea.
  • So what we have here are fuel cells being charged by solar cells. Okay, nothing new there. Now we attach it to a kite & let it fly around. Why? Cheap satellite? How is this cheaper than a high altitude unmanned balloon? Seems useless as a powerplant - are you going to run a long wire from this thing down to your house, or maybe have it airdrop you charged batteries & pick up the empties skyhook-style?

    I'm sure the people who've been working on this have good reasons for doing it. Too bad the CNN article doesn't tell us a single useful thing. Why do they bother mentioning space applications? Aren't they aware that solar charged fuel cells have been standard equipment in space since the Apollo program? And there's no air up there for that wing.

    Enlighten me, someone.
  • Alright this sounds great. Maybe I watched Enemy of the State too many times, but the government will be utilizing the flying wing. Now, what exactly will it be used for? Perhaps 24/7 camera surveillance equipped with infra and heat monitoring? Why not?

    Having only satellite intelligence and cloud coverage can be such a bitch.

    Of course, the government can say that it will be used for collecting atmospheric data and infomation about the weather.
  • It is bad enough to troll so shamelessly, but to SPAM your troll is a wee bit much, don't you think?

  • More background info (Score:4)

    by Anne Marie ( 239347 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @06:22PM (#659374)
    NASA has a page [nasa.gov] on previous involvement with AeroVironment, including descriptions of all previous solar aircraft, starting back in 1971 and up to the Helios (the one in this article) and the ERAST program in general. These things have come a long ways in thirty years.
  • This is what I've been waiting for.

    I've always wanted to live in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunatly, I'm unwilling. No electricity? No telephones? I'd be completely out of touch with the world. No more friends, no nothing.

    A technology that allows one to become completely independant from the rest of the world is a really good thing. With these solar/hydrogren cell packs, one could live in the middle of nowhere, with all the comforts you'd have in the city(assuming you raise/grow your own food). Technology like this puts that dream within the reach of the masses. No more would you need to live in a city, squished like sardines.

    Does anybody know how cheap it is to live on your own, making your own food? DAMNED cheap. Assuming you owned the property and buildings outright, you would only need to work one year in five(assuming minimum wage) to be comfortable.

    Ooooh baby. That forest getaway is looking more and more likely :)

    Dave

    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,

  • The NSA/CIA/FBI's wet dream. (Score:3)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @06:25PM (#659376)
    Long-term, cheap, flying surveillance vehicals. Everyone, everywhere, monitored, doing everything. Link them to some computerized systems like FACE in the UK so they can automatically alert the authorities of interesting individuals and situations picked up by various surveilance senses on the flying wing and you've got yet another reason for loving this wonderful country!
    ---
    seumas.com

  • Re:What's the point of this thing? (Score:3)

    by MightyTribble ( 126109 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @06:26PM (#659377)

    You can't move a weather balloon. Indeed, it's at the whim of those pesky high-altitude winds ... one of these babies can actually stay in position over a target city, perhaps providing wireless / WAP coverage for the entire area. This makes perfect sense, when you look at the aerial density needed in your typical urban environment : they don't get those roof-top spaces for free, you know. If you could get one of these puppies for $1M to cover Manhattan, you'd save that in the first year alone in wireless basestation leases.

    Of course, the math isn't quite that cut and dried, but it still offers tanalising possibilities to wireless service providers. And that's just one possible use with a clear business need.

  • Weight is irrelevant to an airship. You just make the balloon bigger. Cost is the limiting factor in the size of the balloon, not weight.

    My guess is that they didn't use an airship because they wouldn't have gotten research grants or press attention. Airships are a 19th century and early 20th century technology. They're not in fashion these days.

    There's really no practical application for these systems other than aerial photography. If there were, there would have been airship-based versions of them long ago.

  • Good, let the robots do it (Score:3)

    by Anne Marie ( 239347 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @06:35PM (#659379)
    We already have these devices, except they're called airplanes: expensive to maintain, require refueling, occasionally crash, and when they do crash, they kill people (the pilots). Governments aren't going to stop using them (or stop spying in general), so we might as well make them as cheap as possible both in monetary cost and cost to human life.

    Soviet Russia proved that if you want to spy, all you need is a complicent populace to bear the brunt of the spy-work. With these planes doing the work instead of our tenants or landlords doing the work, we don't have to be the ones doing the work. It's ultimately a good thing, comparatively.
  • This the ideal combination for an "unlimited source of renewable electricity". The interesting thing about it is the fact it is put on a airplane. I guess this allow for longer exposure to the sun and more potent rays of sun light to convert to electricity. The only thing that I am wondering is how effiecent are the solar panels.
  • People have asked about or mentioned to me the idea of breaking water down into Hydrogen and Oxygen to power a car. They say such convincing things as "Y'know the space shuttle is propelled by hydrogen and oxygen". I say "Good Thinking, but Needs Some Follow-through". Much like tearing water apart, that would require more energy than it could provide. You need volatility, unstability, and general chaos to produce good energy. If water was not such a stable molecule, it would make a good fuel (a la gasoline - BOOM) but water is stable, and (aside from being too heavy to tote around) it needs a lot of starting energy to get the reaction going. The idea of placing solar cells on an airship would be pretty dumb, unless the weight of those airships was mostly the cells. Who would want to fly in an airship 1,000 miles high? 'Cause you'd want to push as little air around as possible.


    -------
  • The advantage of the flying wing over the balloonis that it can be *flown*, rather than just drift with the wind. It is under human control, and can remain so for months at a time, returning usable data from wherever desired. The ballon can only return usable data for a fairly short time, and the ballon and its instrument package are not recoverable and reusable. The wing comes home again.

    Fuel cells cannot be charged with solar power,they run on hydrogen. The solar power is being used to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. The water must be supplied. I would assume that the wing can 'harvest' water vapor from the atmosphere. For space applications the water would have to be boosted into orbit. Fuels cells are now FAR more reliable than batteries though.
  • The country, the planet, the species, we all need, nay, REQUIRE a cheap, replenishable fuel source, and right quick! If we could slap an array of solar cells on every home's roof and a fuel cell in the basement, and do it for around $10K US, WOW...imagine the uses for the dollars normally spent on heating, cooling and electric! Plus, no appreciable pollution.....COME ON PEOPLE!! We have to get behind these energy alternatives and make them work, stop sucking on the teat of big oil.
  • Health insurance? Money for property taxes, local school taxes, sales taxes - especially when they go way up because so many people have followed your example that the income tax take drops and the need arises to "develop new sources of revenue" - as the saying goes?

    Also, subsistance farming looks charming, but it's far more labor-intensive than most people realize. That's why agro-businesses developed in the first place. You might make it work if you shared labor with a number of other people in rotation. That's been shown to work - to a degree. They're called communes.

  • The article mentioned states that these would be an ideal solution for the space station. I don't follow the space scene that much, but solar panels themselves have already been around for decades, and NASA has already been using fuel cells for the shuttle. The space station should be able to draw plenty of energy from the sun with existing technology, considering the atmosphere isn't getting in the way of the solar rays.

    I don't believe that testing the new technology in this manner is necessary either. Obviously, these things won't be put into orbit and therefore can't cover the range that satellites in a medium to high orbit can. That would mean that you would need more to cover the same area, and it would only last for 6 months. I don't know the exact cost of traditional satellites vs. these things, but since there would be higher maintenance, and a larger quantity, it probably won't be cost effective for at least another decade, maybe two.

    Also, there would have to be an outage while the existing wing is brought down, and a new one is positioned. I would also like to see more posted on how they plan on keeping these things stationary for 6 months straight, unless a client site for wireless net access is going to have a positioning system that will move with the wing. Or maybe a new receiver that doesn't require direct line of sight.

    Call me pessimistic, but I don't see how this will change anything. I tend to think it's one of those things where the engineer are just trying to see if they can do it, and aren't considering whether any real benefits will be produced from their efforts.


    ** Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist (probably misspelled) and therefore probably don't know what I'm talking about anyways. I'm just trying to apply logic to the information I read.
  • ...and fuel cells that suck up 100kWh every *day*.

    Why do people always quote power figures like this, instead of saying the roughly equivalent "suck up 4 kW"? This is roughly equivalent to my saying that I live 16 mph-days from San Francisco, rather than 400 miles.

  • It is unlikely that these things could hold geo-static position very well, even in normal weather. The wind speeds at the altitudes they fly at surely require too much energy to counter without draining the cells and plunging onto your house. More likely, they glide wherever the winds take them. Now comes along a bad storm system and your wireless access is completely screwed. They would be good for drifting, but if they don't maintain station, there seems to be little practical use as an access provider.

    Perhaps if you lofted enough of them to create a network that circled the earth slowly, you would have something. But that sounds awfully expensive to me. Sounds pretty neat, though. Espeically if you had a continously updated map and could watch them scatter away from storm fronts. Then again, they might fly high enough to escape the main blow of the system, but I imagine major systems must really screw up the atmosphere above them. Any weather experts in the house?

  • Check out these guys!
    http://www.platforms-intl.com/

    They are already doing it in Brazil!

    They have tested their "plane" system and it worked, now they have gone into stationary blimps. I can't wait until the FCC/FAA allows them to use this tech in the states! (much cheaper that 12 million). Their "arc" system is about 5 million for a city-covered installation. What local government wouldn't want to be the first city with permanent free wireless internet! ($5 million a pop is NOTHING!)

    Cd
    --
  • Hey.. if these flying wings can serve as cheap satellites, any moderate to large corp. can buy one. We could have spy psuedo-satellites everywhere.

    Next thing you know, the RIAA will be looking in the window to see who has Napster running.

    Spooky spooky!!
  • These things need to stay in pretty much the same spot - over a city for telecommunication routing and the like. Airships don't head into the wind very well, and large anchor ropes are both impractical and a hazard to other aircraft.
  • Fly above the cloud ceiling. High-altitude cirrus will not block very much.

  • The future of enery production (Score:3)

    by Max von H. ( 19283 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @06:47PM (#659392)
    It's not the fact they put these technologies on flying wings that's interesting. The conbination of solar panels + clean fuel cells is a perfect source of clean energy for everyone. Such equipment could be put on every roof, or even be used on large areas and be used as a local powerstation.

    It's clean energy, with only water as a byproduct. Once the systems get into mass production, their prices will drop sharply. The cost of environmental damage isn't quantifiable and we can't keep on relying on fuel and nuclear power forever.

    The applications for such concepts are huge ; from depolluting industrialized countries to the equipment of developing countries by diminishing the power grid infrastrucure.

    If you combine this system to fast-spinning flywheels (read this excellent artice from Wired Magazine [wired.com]), you get permanent, clean energy with little or no maintenance as long as the components can last. Heavy industry could rely on fewer heavy-duty (polluting) powerplants, thus greatly reducing pollution (I don't think we can eradicate all of it, unfortunately).

    To me, it looks like the ideal power source for durable development.

    May I turn your attention to the fact some areas of our planet are becomming unfit to life because of complete ozone layer depletion? It's actually the case in Terra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. By getting outside unprotected you get third-degree burn in less than seven minutes. Organic life isn't possible without the ozone layer.

    If we don't want that to happen to the rest of the planet, it's urgent some serious investments are made in such technologies.

    Think about it.

    /max
  • because they're getting it from CNN, but the fact is that this is a story I've been following for years. I never would have thought of submiting it here because the whole thing is so old hat.

    Hell, I think I saw film of it flying about two years ago.

    The idea is pretty cool though. The plane can do nearly anything high altitude balloons can do, only it can do it for MONTHS at a time, returning data the entire time, but unlike a balloon it is under human controlled powered flight. Fly it where you want it to be. Fly it in circles for as long as you like, and then fly it somewhere else.

    At the end of the mission * fly it home* and land it right where it started from, complete with its instrument package, prep it, and send it off again.

    The plane will always cost more than a single balloon, but it can do more useful work than hundreds of balloon, and then do it again, and again, and again.
  • I saw a show about this exact project on the Discovery Channel about 6 months ago. CNN is just now finding out about it?
    As a builder/flyer of radio controlled model airplanes, I've also heard of such systems employed, albeit on a much smaller scale (literally), on RC planes. One example that comes to mind is a fellow who covered the top surface of the wing on a model plane with solar cells. The resultant power was enough to power the motor and the radio receiver, so his flights of the model are now limited in duration by the batteries in his transmitter, which last for hours. Compare that to the average flight time of about 10 minutes for battery-powered electric model airplanes, and you can see the utility of efficient solar power. No more burning 50 pounds of jet fuel for every mile travelled in an airplane, for example. Of course, NASA has been doing this longer than I've been alive (Fuel cells charged by solar cells, essentially). The trick is to get the price of the technology down into the range of practicality, much like the computer price/performance curve from the 70's-present. I'm sure it can be done if we get Corporate America to realize that "If you make it, they will buy it."
  • The government first use of these will be to monitor drug traffic in places like Colombia and Mexico. Since the FARC don't have Anti-Air capability for 40K+ takedowns but routinely screw with helicopters and even some surveilance aircraft (prop), this is an ideal system to gather intel.

    Only later will these be used for beneficial purposes such as migratory pattern research and pr0n w/o borders servers in the sky;)


  • Cars (Score:1)

    by rigau ( 122636 )
    Its all fine and dandy about the flying machine but the really important issue is how long till they can use this technology in cars. Then we will have a clean environment and can forget about the middle east :)
  • Long-term, cheap, flying surveillance vehicals. Everyone, everywhere, monitored, doing everything.

    Hmmm... Shouldn't that be:

    Long-term, cheap, flying surveillance vehicles. Everyone, everywhere, monitored, doing *nothing*.

    I'm sure NSA/CIA/FBI dream of wasting their budget watching the people of America mow their lawn/scratch their ass/drive to work. You people are way too paranoid.
  • Manufacturing current solar arrays produces horrible pollution and takes about 5-10 years to break even on that count (when compared to burning fossil fuels to produce the same amount of electricity). And many parts of the world (e.g. Seattle) don't see enough sunlight to break even in anyone's lifetime. The economics aren't quite as bad as usual, because you are already making other use of the land -- solar arrays are always more environmentally costly for wasting arable land than for most other reasons -- but the numbers still don't quite pan out.

    You're also discounting the macho do-it-yourself ethic that exists out there, especially among male homeowners who cannot bear to let professionals do "their" job for them, because it might reflect poorly on their manhoods. You know whom I'm talking about; the guys who will routinely try to patch their own roofs but always leave them leaking (and occasionally fall through them, trying). They'd be insane to try to maintain an electrically complex one (and would be a hazard to themselves and others).
  • A technology that allows one to become completely independant from the rest of the world is a really good thing. With these solar/hydrogren cell packs, one could live in the middle of nowhere, with all the comforts you'd have in the city(assuming you raise/grow your own food). Technology like this puts that dream within the reach of the masses. No more would you need to live in a city, squished like sardines.

    Yeah, but individuals spreading out away from the city centers and living where they want to live is called "sprawl" and that's eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil. I can practically hear the Gores and Naders screaming already.
  • Keep your knees together if you fall off. . .

    or get pushed.

  • Re:Airships (Score:4)

    by fnj ( 64210 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @07:07PM (#659401)
    Ah. Lighter than air. A subject I actually know something about :-)

    Regardless of your pronouncements, airships are actually well suited for this purpose. In fact, there are several projects to fulfill this type of mission with unmanned airships.

    At the altitudes involved, there is actually an atmospheric layer where winds are comparatively light.

    The large surface area available on a lighter than air vehicle makes it a natural for collecting energy from sunlight. Gas retention is not a problem. Decades ago, comparatively small free balloons were already flown for periods of six months or more. A far cry from a few days, eh?

    There is actually currently a renaissance of airships the likes of which has not been seen since World War II. Zeppelin Metallwerken in Germany has developed a unique semirigid design, which will initially be marketed for touring. CargoLifter, also in Germany, has just completed construction of a vast hangar, and is about to begin construction of a ship capable of carrying bulky indivisible items of cargo up to 160 tons for delivery from hover at minimally prepared destinations. Advanced Technologies Group in Britain is flight testing a scale model of a another cargo carrying design which uses an air cushion to make a large advance in ground handling. Lightship, in Britain, is currently conducting successful trials in Kosovo of a land-mine detecting and surveying airship.

    References:
    http://www.zeppelin-nt.com/ [zeppelin-nt.com]
    http://www.cargolifter.com/ [cargolifter.com]
    http://www.airship.com/index_frames.htm [airship.com]
    http://www.airships.com/ [airships.com]
    http://www.mineseeker.com/ [mineseeker.com]
    http://spot.colo rad o.edu/~dziadeck/airship/htmls/introduction.htm [colorado.edu]

  • Re:Airships (Score:4)

    by ca1v1n ( 135902 ) <snook.guanotronic@com> on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @07:10PM (#659402)
    For info on a prototype, look here. [virginia.edu] I can't tell you much more about it, except that the solar car team (which I am on) shares a lab with them and they often leave doughnuts laying around.
  • By getting outside unprotected you get third-degree burn in less than seven minutes.

    This is so obviously untrue it sounds like the meat of a chain letter. The next line should be "So forward this to your 1700 closest friends, and Microsoft and AOL's email-o-matic collector will automatically submit it to your congressman and the UN."

  • The biggest problem with this will be solar cell degradation. After the cells are excited so many times, they just don't excite to the same levels anymore. [Insert your jokes about the same old pr0n here.] There is a way to prevent some of this, but since I'm doing a little on-the-side, patentable research on it, I'm not posting it on /. =)
    --
  • It's aways a sunny day at 50,000 feet. ;-)
    --Mike--
  • Why would it need water? We have two processes at work here. The first is using electricity to turn water into oxygen and hydrogen. The second is using fuel cells to turn oxygen and hydrogen into electricity.

  • Re:Solar arrays pollute (Score:3)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @07:21PM (#659407) Homepage Journal
    This is a troll using a myth as ammo. That it got modded as insightful is a worry. Here's a good URL [ferii.sn] for solar myth-busting.
  • Yeah. You know, I'm sure the people in Tiennamen Square had no reason to feel paranoid either, just because there were govenrment cameras posted on every lightpost and street corner, taping the protesting students and then waging a full-on airwave war over government television, feeding massive propoganda to their populace.

    Besides, that's the whole point of a system like FACE. It does the scanning for you so that you (a human) only waste your time on relavent concerns that it has detected.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • Lightning is basically the sun turning our atmosphere into one Giant Van de Graff generator, with the winds somehow creating electrical potential deferrentials between the ground and cloud. However, it is not really that well understood, and harnessing power from lightning would be like trying to harness power from nuclear bombs. It just comes way to fast to store it in any tech we have today.

  • Re:it's probably cheaper than $12M (Score:3)

    by Tassach ( 137772 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @07:29PM (#659410)
    Let's say that they wind up costing $12mil each. If you want 24x7x365 coverage, you'll need at least three -- one in the air, one in the shop, and one on stand-by. That's 36mil. Alot of money? Nope - that's only about 1/10th of what it would cost to put one satellite into orbit, and you'd have a much higher payload to boot.

    If you want 24x7x365 coverage for a particular geographical area using a satellite, you either need a bird in geosynchronous orbit (which means higher launch cost and more power needed to transmit) or a constellation of low-earth orbit ones. Until we get a cheap way of putting things in orbit, this is the next best thing.

  • Well, they can video-tape it. It must be comforting to know that you're being watched everywhere you go in public. Sure, it won't prevent you from being killed or maimed, but at least it'll be archived on video and perhaps the person who did it will be found. Lucky you.
    ---
    seumas.com
  • Indeed, and all you need to start this cycle is to supply a continuous outside source of energy to power it, and . . . water, which must be supplied from somewhere, as claimed.

  • Describing it in terms of energy per day makes sense, because it's not a constant thing. Your figure of 4kW is misleading, because it's actually more like 8kW during the day, and nothing at night. It's not so much like saying you live 16mph-days from San Francisco, and more like saying you live eight hours from San Francisco. However, the kWh unit is totally messed in any case; that's what JOULES are for.
  • Agreed! I can deal with the occasional typo and the grammatical errors. I'm guilty of them myself, so I'm not going to point fingers (no, Slashdot is not the equivalent of the NY Times..Why should anyone expect it to be?).

    What irks me the most about Slashdot, especially in the recent past (last year or so) is the amazing number of story reposts. It is as if many of the story editors don't even read this site anymore. How many times have we seen what is essentially the same story reposted to Slashdot within the span on a week? Too many for me to count...

    I won't really even get into some of the other minor things that bug me, like the zealot-ish slants many of the stories take (say, stories on mp3, linux, etc), because that could be argued for in a couple of ways (the editors post what interests them...and/or what interests the majority of readers).

    Oh yeah, and I also hate Jon Katz, but I won't mention that..I'm already getting the -1; Offtopic, why bother risking the -1; Redundant?

  • I posted this message [slashdot.org] and recieved the following response which suggests that I posted this same comment 30 years ago:

    Easy does it!

    This comment has been submitted already, 270292 hours , 27 minutes ago. No need to try again.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • *cough*LawOfConservationOfEnergy*cough*

    By the way, look at the fuel for the SR-71. Throw a match at it and it just sits there wondering what the big deal is, and your match goes out. There are many different ways for chemical energy to be harvested. Alkaline batteries contain rather stable chemicals, but they have proven remarkably successful as energy sources in many applications. It doesn't matter how the energy comes out, it just means you might have to ask a Chemical Engineer instead of a Mechanical Engineer or Electrical Engineer how to put it to use.
  • You make valid points, but please remember that not all pollution is equal. The stuff that is (might be) responsible for the condition of the ozone in Tierra del Fuego doesn't come from powerplants. Indeed, it's not related to electricity production in any way.
  • You, um, can load it in the plane on the ground before it takes off.
  • Actually there is a plan to use airships as highspeed communication relay points. Like cheap satelites. I believe that they will be solar powered. Sorry, I don't remember anything else. If anyone knows the details please let me know.

  • Re:Weight is irrelevant (Score:3)

    by larkost ( 79011 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @07:38PM (#659420)

    Well, you are right, and you are wrong. Imaging (pictures, infared, sidescan radar, etc) is one very good use for this sort of aircraft, and worth the high development costs to both for inteligence gathering and scientific studies (the kind that go into studying the enviornment and wind up helping US agriculture to see paterns that bring more food to your table for example). But that is only the cash cow that is going to get the research done.

    The big deal with this sort of system is the ability to selectively "park" it at high altitude over one spot for extended periods of time (the current holy grail is in the two month range), and serve as a communications platform. In simpler terms they want to replace low orbit sateites (*cough* *Iridium* *cough*).

    Putting something in orbit cost a lot per pound, and if you make a mistake on something in building the "payload", or something unforseen happens, or if Murphey's Law just rears it fickel head, then you are stuck with what is in orbit. There is just not enough money to go out there and fix satelites in orbit in most cases (Hubbel being a major exception). But if something were to go wrong with a payload on one of these birds all you would have to do is tell it to land, and then fix/replace the payload, and since this costs soo much less than orbiting a satelite, you probably can afford to have a backup waiting on the runway to replace the whole thing.

    Now as to the question of baloons/dirigibles, they simply do not have the staying power that this mission calls for. It is hard (impossible) to construct an envelope (the bag that holds the gas) that does not leak, meaning that missions longer than a few days are simply not possible. Add to that the fact that the winds at the altitudes called for in these projects tend to be faster than lighter-than-air-craft have posted in the past, makes them simply the wrong horse to bet on in this race.

    It is not about weight, it is about the ability to do the mission at hand.

  • Re:The future of enery production (Score:3)

    by dbullock ( 32532 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @07:40PM (#659421) Homepage
    May I turn your attention to the fact some areas of our planet are becomming unfit to life because of complete ozone layer depletion? It's actually the case in Terra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. By getting outside unprotected you get third-degree burn in less than seven minutes. Organic life isn't possible without the ozone layer.[sic]

    Try this instead.

    http://apegaia.iro e.f i.cnr.it/news/press_releases/chicago.htm [fi.cnr.it]


    Not as dramatic as your "planet's becoming unfit for human life", but a little more realistic.

    (yawn)
  • The only statistic your page disagrees with is the figure for breaking even (1 year versus more than 1 year). I never said solar arrays are never economical; but they're hardly the no-brainer decision that everyone tries to make them out to be -- they, like everything else, have costs, and those costs would be magnified incredibly if they were implemented on the scale that the original poster was envisioning. Especially the costs due to social engineering.
  • A geosynchronous satellite will cost fifty to a hundred million to launch, plus tens of millions to build a machine that can communicate effectively over twenty thousand miles. This wing costs twelve million for the research project (read: ten to a hunrded times cheaper per unit once they get rolling), and basically nothing to launch. The electronics will be much simpler since they only have to cover one thousandth of the distance. Higher maintainance is also bogus. A satellite has a finite life too (five to twenty years, depending on the satellite), and once it dies it can't just be brought down, tuned up a little, and sent back up for next to nothing.

    There is no need to worry about outages while replacing the wings. Send the second wing up, THEN bring the first wing down.

    The wings fly at an altitude such that a dish should not be necessary. As such, line of sight is all that's necessary, and that can be maintained by simply having it circle in place. The small amount of movement it produces will not be a problem; it will only break things if it starts to fly over the horizon.
  • While I am not immune to the idea of living 'out in the wilderness', I would just like to have that technology available at a reasonable price for regular homes/apartments complexes. It would be great in mostly sunny areas (Southwest/South US, Mediterranean, etc.) to be able to get 80+% (assuming a cheaper, scaled down version of this panel/fuel cell setup is sold for the home market) of your power from solar panels.

  • Re:Reread my post (Score:3)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @07:58PM (#659425) Homepage Journal
    I didn't say it was a great URL, I just had to find it quickly. Search Google for "solar power myth" and you might find something with more evidence. You will find propaganda from all side; pro-solar, pro-nuclear, pro-fossil, etc.

    However, modern solar panels are a no-brainer. Moreover, we need some way of distributed power generation because power transmission from massive generators through ultra-high voltage lines to high usage clumps is undesirable (and not just because of cancer clusters). Solar power also produces power at about the right times (as in most power is consumed during the day).

  • Hehehe :) You don't realize how much thought and research I've put into this ;)

    Health Insurance: I live in Canada, where almost everything(health-related) is free.
    Money for taxes: Well, as far as property taxes goes, it's *real* cheap. There are huge tracts of land in Ontario(and we're talking good land here, not arctic tundra or anything) that are completely tax free - sort of like the Homesteader's Act. School taxes are part of income taxes here, and since I wouldn't be working much, I wouldn't be paying much. Ditto for sales tax.

    You've got a good point about taxes going up, though. However, I doubt enough people would do it in large enough numbers to warrant adiscriminating tax law.

    As far as sustinance farming, it's not as bad as you might think. I live in an agricultural community/area(my town is "the city", and there's only about 8000 people here), and I grew up with and around farmers. It's hard, yes, but easier than commuting an hour a day and working eight hours. *trust me*. Of course, not everyone could handle being far away from any population centre, but that's a different argument. Oh, back to farming. For a family of six, you can expect to work ~14hrs a day during harvest and sowing seasons, and about ~2-3hrs a day the rest of the year. That's assuming you have animals, and don't just rely on plants(very dangerous to rely solely on plants!).

    Now, I'm not going to argue with you on socio-political-religious points, but "communes" are helped North America into cohesive nations, and if for some reason national government broke down communes would be the first things that rose to take its place.

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • Not a bad point, but you've got to take the idea in context. "Sprawl" in urban areas is usually a really bad thing for many reasons.

    Economical: You often have a large population with few places to employ them.
    Environmental: Current day sprawl is really bad because you lay down *HUGE* tracts of road for all those people, plus the density is still too high to have real farms in the area.

    I'm talking about something completely different. In Canada, there's about a square kilometer of good land per person(not counting tundra, which raises it to about 3 square kilometers/person). I'm not talking about having neighbors within hollaring distance. :)

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • Indeed you can. But why waste lift performance to carry water to altitude that is full of water vapor?
  • Well, I guess it comes down to whether the device for extracting water is heavier than the water itself. If it's not, and the plane can fly at altitude with the combined weight of both, then it sounds good to me. My point is just that you don't NEED such a device.
  • And my only point was that you needed water.

    In any case, I take it you've never been in a light plane flying through a cloud? How about a CAR driving through a fog?

    The vehicle itself is the water collection 'device.' Indeed, you can't help but collect it, and for a light plane such water collection can be so extreme as to seriously reduce performance. The problem is often just how to get RID of the damn stuff.
  • Manufacturing current solar arrays produces horrible pollution and takes about 5-10 years to break even on that count (when compared to burning fossil fuels to produce the same amount of electricity)


    What about the cost of building internal combustion engines and the like? Surely these carry at least as much of a penalty as manufacturing solar cells.


    www.infobreakfast.com

  • This is another child of Paul McCready's genius. He is one of my all-time heroes. Here's a short history of his astonishing acheivements.

    He was a competitive glider pilot, and won the national championship a few years in a row. After the last time, he showed everybody the little circular slide-rule he had developed to maximize speed and range (the McCready SpeedRing) which pretty much revolutionized the sport.

    In the mid 70's, he was in debt to some friends for $50,000 -- and he heard about the Kramer Prize, $50,000 to the first person to fly a human powered aircraft through a 1-mile figure-eight course. McCready was building indoor duration models at the time (unbelieveably fragile creations of wire and film that would fly for 20 minutes on a few twists of a rubber band) and realized that that same technology could be used to make a plane that would win the prize. The result was the Gossamer Condor -- a externally-braced plane to make something as light and large-span as possible. It easily won the prize. Unfortunately, he went through about $100,000 to build it. Later, he won the next Kramer Prize for the first human-powered plane to fly the English Channel, and then build a few early solar powered planes (piloted by a very light young woman).

    GM hired McCready to build a car to win a solar-car race across Australia. McCready's astonishing realization was that it was all about aerodynamics -- where other teams were trying to maximize the amount of energy they were getting from the sun, McCready was worried about going really fast. It won the race by several days!

    McCready built a flying Pteradon for a Smithsonian movie. It flew, flapped its wings for power, and was successfully filmed for the IMAX film.

    And then there are these flying wings. Truly astonishing machines. They currently hold the record for the highest-flying propeller-powered planes, and are just (to me) insanely beautiful. Here is a gallery [nasa.gov] of photos of Helios. This picture in particular [nasa.gov] I find just sublime. What a machine. What a guy.

    Thad

  • 'Why would a platform flying slow circles way above the weather, over your city be useful?' someone asked.

    Low-cost wireless networking, for one thing. And all of the things that are now handled at tremendous expense by geosynchronous satellites, for another.

  • Actually, if you could figure out how to create cheap lightning on demand with these things, you might have something really useful, an ozone generator. Fly a bunch over the antarctic and get Al Gore off everyone's back

    DB
  • http://www.cargolifter.com/

    so weight doesn't come into it.
  • Anchor ropes are just a bloody stupid idea, I don't know where you got that from but modern airships are quite capable of holding station against 70mph winds. The goodyear blimp might not be able to but it's hardly state of the art in airship design.

  • Right, and when we stop ignoring cars, we realise that almost every house DOES have at least one of its own internal combustion engines, and we ARE in deep environmental doo-doo. :P

  • You're way, way out of date on envelope materials. Weeks to months of flight time are possible. The limiting factor airships have at the moment is carrying the fuel to stay up for long periods, which these NASA blokes seem to have solved.

    Airships are also quite capable of holding station against significant winds. Even the ships of the 1930s were capable of a sustained 80mph.

    You may be thinking of the goodyear blimp and other similar advertising blimps.

  • So... What's the wind speed at the altitude that these things fly?
  • SkyStation [skystation.com].

    Uses a lighter-than-air solar powered helium airship.

    ----
  • modern airships are quite capable of holding station against 70mph winds

    70mph is a gentle breeze for higher altitudes, and besides they would be under solar power.
  • The question is, will this help meet my unbound desire for cheap, ubiquitous, unmetered, wireless Internet access?

    Puts the phrase "my internet service crashed" in a different light, huh?

    -Peter

  • Suppose they design an aircraft using this technology that can maintain a stable altitude in the ozone layer (15-45 km) It's payload would consist of huge air intake and catalysts or absorption devices for NOx, Cl, Fl, and other ozone depleting chemicals. All this would be guided by an onboard computer to launch, maintain a stable flight path for months, and when the absorbers are full land the aircraft. Perhaps it could borrow much of the technology used in UAVs [af.mil]

  • Unfortunately, the person has no evidence to back up his claims. Now, let's take his point that a 4 person household could be met by 10 - 20 m2 of cells. Assuming 5KW for the household (i.e. they're efficient):
    Solar power @ 1KW / m2 = 5 m2 to start with
    Reduce by 50% for night, you're now to 10 m2
    Reduce by another 50% (max 25% of total) due to weather (depends on area, it might be more or less), you're now at 20m2
    Oops, these suckers are only (let's assume you grabbed the most efficient you could find) 25% efficient - you're now at 80m2.

    Assuming you never have bad weather, you're at 40m2, which is double his high estimate - and that's a best case. Assuming his 10% efficiency, and you live in the NW or NE, you probably need 200m2 to power that house. Doable, but what's the cost to manufacture 200m2 of cells? What amount of energy goes into the manufacture? How long do they last (i.e. how often do you need to make new ones)?

    And yes, I actually took a course in this in college. Solar cells are wonderful, but they're not the "silver bullet" - same with most things.

  • With a cruising speed of only 19-25mph.

  • How is that going to cope with the 'obvious high velocity wind conditions at said altitudes'?

    Regular airships (goodyear blimp etc) fly at 40-50mph. The rigid airships of the 1930s could cruise at 80mph.

    Envelope fabrics have been helium impermeable for so long now that it isn't even funny. Because an airship doesn't have to use any power just keeping itself in the air it can use all the power for thrust and control.

    Add to that the lift provided by helium increases with the cube of the size an airship will be able to carry a much larger payload.

  • Two problems with your statement. The first is that the sources of ozone depletion are still under argument. It's just that one side of the argument isn't very popular with the media. Throwing money at a problem when you don't know the cause is just silly since you are much more likely to get a wrong random answer than a right one. All cost and no gain.

    But let's say that those nasty CFCs are really the cause of the ozone depletion as the ozone warriors would have it. The source problem has pretty much cured itself through the banniing of most ozone depleting materials (and at quite a pretty penny too). This leaves us with managing the aftermath. CFCs are quite long-lived chemicals and you have two options, you can create giant collectors to filter all high altitude air on planet Earth or you can create ozone at a high altitude to replace the losses. The collecters aren't here but taking these self supporting flying wings up with tesla coils on board might just be a practical measure. It could be funded by an ecologists version of the "plant a tree in Israel" thing that's popular with many jews. You would probably fly them from the tip of south america and if an ozone hol develops in the northern hemisphere you have a wealth of launch sites. As a bonus, you would also create a great tourist attraction.

    Are there any EE or CE folks out there who could share how to calculate the ozone created per kw fed into a Tesla coil?

    DB
  • What about sterling engined gliders? Basically, they have GPS and simple station holding avionics, so they circle in the same general area, day after day. They're above the clouds, so they can recharge the fuel cells for the night's flight during the day. During the day, they take advantage of the heat differential between black top of wing and white bottom for a sterling engine.

    huh? has anyone built one? How high could you get it to go?
  • How self similar are the air streams at altitude? How far do I have to fly in order to find one to "blow me back" to where I was?
  • But "birds" provide wider coverage -- larger footprint from higher altitude, so you'd need ALOT of these wings. Still might be cheap enough for local coverage, but likely not global.


  • I have a colleague who's working on a project where the oxidation process of ferrous metals is harnessed for what is hoped to be enough energy to power an automobile. It's a lot like the hydrogen fuel cell, but a much slower process with a (currently) much lower energy yield. Unfortunately, the project is highly controversial, and though it receives no federal funding, it has its opponents nonetheless. The most vehemous opponent, his neighbor, has already called the city three times to have the eyesore hauled away.



    Seth
  • The "jet stream" is over a hundred miles per hour at times, and it is generally west to east. I don't remember if the analogous jet stream south of the equator blows the other way or not, but I suspect not.
  • What about sterling engined gliders?

    You're so ignorant (can't even spell Stirling correctly) that I'm going to assume that your post is a joke.
    --

  • The difficulty you run into is air pressure. You need a certain mass of helium to support a given weight of airship, and the volume occupied by the lifting gas goes by V = nRT/P. At a possible loitering altitude of 70,000 feet, you are talking about 16 times the volume of the same gas at sea level.

    Your shell has to be big enough to hold all of this gas, even when it's very thin (and doesn't displace a lot of air). The shell still has to sustain its weight, so it doesn't lose mass very fast as the design is scaled to higher and higher maximum altitudes. I don't know how high you can go before modern materials give you a machine that is effectively 100% shell and no payload, but 70,000 feet may be into the region of diminishing returns.

    A blimp, or a superpressure balloon with an internal ballonet (to hold its shape during launch and the initial ascent) might be more tractable than a rigid airship. If I were designing this, I'd add a second ballonet inside the helium space to hold hydrogen for rapid ascent, and dump the hydrogen as the machine got up to altitude (and the air ballonet was already empty).
    --

  • How about to some of the OTHER amazing Engineers that work at AeroVironment?

    They're great! Why so touchy? Paul McCready is a legend, that's all.

  • What when [name any tiny but critical part] turns out to have not such a long lifetime?
    The aircraft comes down, either under control or out of control.

    If it's under control, it either lands for repairs or is put down somewhere safe.

    If it's out of control, it gets snared by the first tree it hits and turned into wreckage. Remember, this is a gadget designed to fly under the power of sunlight; it can't weigh much. The previous versions have resembled tissue-covered model airplanes. In a fight between the airplane and your house, the house would win handily (besides, the typical cruising speed of this thing near sea level is probably under 20 MPH).
    --

  • Are there any EE or CE folks out there who could share how to calculate the ozone created per kw fed into a Tesla coil?
    That kind of information is hard to come by.

    Still, you can get a ball-park estimate by guesstimating your efficiency of conversion of O2 into atomic oxygen; atomic oxygen is then available to combine with O2 to form O3. (This is the job normally performed by EUV, extreme ultra-violet. This light can't get through to the ground very well because it's too energetic; it gets absorbed in the process of snapping molecules apart. Lesser ultraviolet is absorbed in the process of breaking O3 up into O2+O, but the O just recombines with O2 to form more O3. And heat. It's the heat released in this process that's largely responsible for the stratosphere warming up with increasing altitude, which keeps it stratified.)

    What you are proposing is to replace all the atomic oxygen that's recombined into O2 by chlorine catalysts with fresh. I think you'll find that humanity doesn't generate enough electricity to do this.
    --

  • The question is, will a couple hundred pounds be enough payload to do anything truly significant?
    Hell, yeah. Think what your cell phone can do with an ounce of electronics. Multiply that by a thousand, and you're only up to sixty or so pounds. Antennas aren't difficult to lighten up; anything you can do with a bar or plate of metal, you can do with aluminum foil on top of graphite composite.

    And don't forget that Moore's Law is still in effect. You might want to call these birds down every 6 months just for upgrades.
    --

  • Even if that is the large scale trend, aren't there likely to be eddies (like in a stream) that actually flow backwards, or at least much slower?

    That's what I meant about self similarity.

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