Concepts Part1

This stage of design is not so much about looks, aesthetics or style. It is focusing on solving the design problem: How to design the gas bag so it does not interfere with the flying experience and minimizing landing space requirement.

The initial Package drawing were drawn in Solidworks. Just to establish a basic skeleton to the aircraft, consisting the essential components - hydrogen tanks, fuel cells, turbine engine, seat for 1 person and most important the wing size. The wings will be inflated and take up vertical space as well.

The problem and it is the problem to all lighter than air aircraft - LTAA (even though this is only a semi-lighter than air aircraft) is it's gas bag. All LTAA requires a large amount of displacement to generate enough lift to lift the aircraft.

The idea of this concept is to reshape the gas bag and convert it into lifting surface - wings and turn the aircraft into a glider. In the history of LTAA, all the blimps were basically long cigar like tube shapes, some of them are very well streamlined against the frontal wind, but their extremely large body rendered them vulnerable to extreme weather, heavy cross wind, and making them harder to control and required a lot of power to move forward.

By spreading the volume of the gas bag into a large horizontal surface it can be utilized to generate lift for gliding making it easier to travel long distance and dramatically reduce power consumption, in the mean time making it easier to operate and adept to any weather conditions.

So based on the Package drawings, I started to sketch some ideas, just to play around with the configuration of the wings/gas bag. Trying to find a good configuration of the wing that provides enough volume but also requires less space. The design requirements for the wings are - they have to maintain enough volume for displacement but also maintain the air foil shape.

Concept marked "1" is a bi-wing (double wing) configuration. It is probably the most obvious idea, but it is proven to work. The bi-wing configuration provides good lift but produce more drag than single wing configurations, that is the reason it was render obsolete. With the design requirement of the wings multiple wings seem to be the better choice.

Concept marked "2" is a strange looking aircraft. The idea is simple, if the wings don't provide enough lift, just add an additional gas bag to fill the requirement. Of cause the gas bag on top is going to become a problem with the cross wind and frontal wind, but there is something cool about this aircraft, it is different from all other concepts, and the idea of utilizing vertical space comes to mind....

to be continued.....