Popis: |
One potential future application of airships, especially “hybrid” airships is in heavy lift. “Hybrid” denotes substantial use of aerodynamics lift in addition to aerostatic lift in bearing the cargo and vessel. Designs lifting hundreds of tons have been advanced. However, the laws governing buoyant lift and aerodynamic lift do not scale proportionally to one another as scale increases. For a given flight condition, the heaviness fraction achievable drops as a given airship geometry is scaled up. The impact on the performance and operation of very large airships, and in particular, very large hybrid airships, is examined. |