Airship Project

Well, the airship project has progressed to a small-scale blimp for personal and recreational use, see above. Also the website is now www.airships.vadien.com, so check there for more information on airships. Current progress is negated in the face of the vast impracticality of this entire project.

Design Progress

Well, I got my mylar and heat sealer, they're both pretty awful. The heat sealer doesn't work well enough on the mylar for it to hold any kind of gas, however is useful for a few other things. The mylar is about what I expected, and can be glued, but I think I might "invest" in some mylar party balloons instead, just because they're tried and tested and pretty cheap. Maybe the mylar will find a different use.

I've been reviewing many designs of the zeppelins of old, and started designing my own.. The BZ-1 is my nickname for it (Ben's Zeppelin, lol). Here are some basic plans, stats, 3D mock-ups, etc.

NOTE: All dimensions given below are in cm, for the model, but would be in normal meters for the full sized version.

Length: 300cm

Largest Diameter: 44cm

Framework: 20 main frame rings, 16 longitudinal girders

Control Surfaces: Horizontal and Vertical fins between rings 4-1, control surfaces extend past that, are roughly 4.5x16cm square(less surface area)

Gas capacity: 17 18" mylar balloons, unknown volume or lift yet, requires further experimentation.

Motors: two at ring 10, two more at ring 14.

Materials Purchased

Just bought a small (probably cheap-junk) heat sealer from china, and a nice big roll of 1 mil mylar sheeting, this should be enough to get some kind of airship off the ground.

The carbon fiber though, I'm going to have to wait for sponsorship on that one I think.....

Airframe Plan

Well, Blogger won't let me upload it in any reasonable resolution, but here's my basic airframe plan... I've decided to go with carbon fiber because it's strong and light and basically just the best material for anything.

In case you can't read the diagram above (which I hardly expect you to be able to) there will be 15 rings, connected together by 8 supports that go the entire length from nose to tail. The rings will require a total of 1884cm of carbon fiber, the supports 2480, for a grand total of 4364cm of carbon, which is a lot. At the prices/weights I've found for 0.5mm carbon rod, the completed airframe will weigh about 14 grams (PLENTY light) and cost about $70, which is tragic and sad because I don't have $70.

In other news, for the gas bag, I've found a near perfect solution, being that thin polyethylene tubing is available to make your own bags, you simply heat seal the ends (melt the plastic together) and you're done.. This is incredibly perfect for what I'm trying to do, however the roll of bag is only available in something like a quarter mile long roll, and for about $100, and the pizza-cutter rolly heat sealer of magical awesome is even more.

My other options are somehow make a heat sealer, and then just make the tube by seaming together 50" wide mylar, which would be a much cheaper option, but less perfect and easily leak-proofed.. I might be doing nothing but plans for awhile, folks.

If anyone just has like, a heap of money they don't really want, but DOES want to see an awesome miniature zeppelin, point them my way....

Gas bag construction..

The actual construction of the gas bag is going to be difficult, as there's little to no info about such things on the internet.. The best I could find was this thread on an RC forum, talking about gluing together mylar film for small blimps. Since my project is substantially bigger, it shouldn't be as sensitive to variables like the thickness/weight of the mylar, so I can make a tougher envelope and not have to worry so much about it tearing, however I haven't decided what glue would be best for this, and how to do the ends of the envelope....

The mylar is available from Ebay down to 1 mil, which is thicker then the RC forum was using but I might even go for 2 mil just because having these things leak/tear sounds like a nightmare and a half. The mylar on ebay is reflective, and is apparently intended to conserve light in indoor marijuana growing operations.... As much as I'd like it to be un-coated (which would probably clear), this mylar should suffice. I will probably by a 4'x100' roll so I have extra to experiment with, perhaps I'll make a bigger/smaller zeppelin when I'm done with this one...

Leaks should not be as much of an issue because I will not have very high pressure gas, unlike regular latex balloons, the mylar balloon is exactly the size I want it, and doesn't need to be stretched when inflated, so that's a plus.

In order to really get the zeppelin look, I'm going to make it rigid bodied, which is silly for an airship of this minute size, but I really love the framework look of zeppelins, so I'm going to do it no matter how difficult.

These posts aren't very structured... Excuse my excitement.

Density/Buoyancy

Ok, so in order to estimate a size of the airship alone with the weight of the airship, I need to figure out how much hydrogen I need to lift a certain weight. In this case I'm more concerned with how big it is when it's done, I know I can make some pretty small electronics, so I'm going to worry about that a bit later. A start size for the basic gas bag I'm going to say is about 38cm (it'll be 40 including the framework) by 2 meters (It'll be about 270 long including nose/tail, which I might put smaller cone gas bags in for ballast purposes). To find the area of this basic cylinder, I find the area of one circular end, and multiply by the length. In this case I'm after cubic centimeters, so I'll be doing everything with cm.

The area of a circle is pi times the radius, squared, so for a 38cm circle, the radius is 19cm, which means the equation will pi 19^2, which comes out to 1134.1, so that's in square cm, now multiply that by the length, 2m=200cm, and you get 226822.8 cm^3.

A liter (A liter is 1000 cm^3)of air weights about 1.225g, where as a liter of hydrogen weighs 0.08688g, so the difference between them is how much lift a liter of hydrogen makes, which comes out to about 1.136g/liter. Since a liter is 1000 cm^3, that's 0.0013g/cm^3, so the amount of lift for our gas bag is now easily calculable to about 250 grams. That's over half pound, which should easily cover electronics, and will probably cover framework too, so we're in luck!

Here's the design so far:

And the REAL plan for an R23 zeppelin:

Mine will get better, I promise.

Introduction

Ok, so this is probably crazy, but I'm a 17 year old guy, absolutely adore airships (like most a lot of people) and not this goodyear mushy blimp stuff either, the good ol' rigid ones, to such an extent I desperately want my own, since it'll at least be awhile until I can afford to build a real one, I'm going to build it in miniature.

I've had a copy of the original Hindenburg blueprints on my wall for as long as I can remember, and have had this fascination since I was maybe 8, I first got a book explaining the basics and had my mom read it over and over.

As of now I haven't decided much about it's designs, but I'm thinking balsa frame, mylar film balloons, electric control system (possibly a camera, so you could fly out of sight!), and I'm going to fill it with home-made hydrogen for lift, as opposed to using up precious non-renewable helium (I've always wanted to make hydrogen anyway..).

I'll post here whenever I have good info/designs/anything interesting, hopefully I can make this dream a reality in not terribly long (I'm thinking maybe 6 months, possibly longer/shorter). I'm not going to bother looking too professional with my pictures, as this really is just screwing around, but I hope I can help anyone else who wants to make one, and I'll post any valuable data I might come up with.

While I work out the details, you can enjoy some zeppelin videos (and 1930's culture) from Youtube!