jedcstuff

2008-07-06

More thoughts on rigid airships & buoyancy

Adding some postscripts to my yesterday morning's blog post re rigid airships, First, my scifi short story "Masters of the Trading Game"
http://www.escalatorhi.com/techscifi/mastersofthetradinggame.html also describes use of a jumpsuit which has the ability to quickly inflate using hydrogen to enable the wearer to overall become neutral density in air, plus or minus some, depending on purposes at the time (such as initially for escaping from a suddenly falling small plane; and later to enable bounding across the desert in near-neutral density buoyancy pressure inflation of the jumpsuit, in that story.) Second, A new idea of mine this morning, of making rigid airships or other ultra-lightweight structures of something like the "solid smoke" ultra-insulating material either by using hydrogen as its enclosed gas, maybe even foamed into a partial vacuum so as to use the cell walls to provide some compression strength to the below STP pressure of hydrogen gas inside each cell; or to use new ultra-insulating lightweight materials on the exterior of rigid airships while using hot air inside instead of helium or hydrogen, the incombustible super insulating material, also very lightweight used to surround the hot air in the rigid airship, would not need much routinely electrically-added heat to maintain residual heat-pressure losses, and possibly a surplus pressure of the hot air could provide rigidity and strength to the rigid airship. And a final quite different item yet in reference to the Hindenburgh dirigible disaster at Lakehurst NJ, that the wrong lessons were learned by the tragedy, more correct ones would be that the Hindenburgh had been painted by a nitrate-containing paint, extremely flammable, and its hazard had been reported in an internal corporate memo but its implications did not get adequately realized by the company no doubt due to the characteristic of large corporate intercommunication comprehension inertia, especially significant here considering that the Hindenburgh originally was designed to use the non-combustible gas helium but later had to switch to hydrogen due to an embargo in the gas sale. Oh, and another idea, what would happen in a mixture of the two gases, helium plus hydrogen, what partial pressure would be of sufficiently low combustion hazard risk, and would it have lower density at standard temperature and pressure as compared to the more expensive pure helium, for use in rigid airships, maybe even in the standard toy party balloons.

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