Recommending a wee look through
Quasi-Static Nonlinear Analysis of a Celestial
Icosahedron Shaped Vacuum Lighter Than Air
Vehicle
By
Kyle D. Moore
And a bit more chat on twitter
Personally I’d see it marginally possible as a means to arraying net lift structures
Its a mindblowing idea. Though my initial thought is that these must never be built, because of the potential of polluting the atmosphere.
An old article (2003) about the Hunt GravityPlane:
http://www.renewableone.com/fuellessflight/flf//huntnews.html
And an old video (2006):
AWE is already having a hard time to be realized. So with that kind of thing …
Less mind blowing
More mind sucking
Had on
Stored compressed air to drive the thrust initially
And
Stored compressed air to drive an air compressor to sink again
Anyone?
Let’s make it whackier instead.
Why not build a self compressing plane body
Like a tube with hoops front to back filled with buoyant gas… To deflate wind in a line front to back so the plane body becomes a bit sectional like a worm… or shrink each of the rings with a central tether winder.
I dont know if we want to go there, but maybe harvesting mois in the air for bouyancy is a better option than compressing air?
Anyways that discussion is moot with kites as we have the tether, and with planes until you can first make it float weightless…
So lets make a guesstimate of how this buoyancy could work for a delta kite. Lets assume wingspan 30 meter, thickness avg. 1.0 meter, chord 4 meter. This gives us wing area around 120 m2, volume 120m3. That would put buoyancy lift at approximately 60 kg, considering 50% efficiency of vacum balls weight/volume fillability vs pure vacuum. The skin of the kite using eg. 400 g per m2 layup would amount to more than 96 kg. Then you need all the rest. So at this scale it would not work so well. I guess somewhere around 70-80 meter wingspan it could become viable, or a kite with reduced net weight force could also be viable…
Now, if you could “capture” vacum in a material that would be lighter than air and at the same time provide some compressive resistance (being a foam replacement inside the wing), then youre talking. But such a material would probably be invented first for aircraft use before it found its way to AWE, so thats probably still some years/decades/centuries away.
Jup… seems pretty marginal IMHO
I hope everyone here is able to debunk this perpetual motion scheme for transportation. If not, get educated.
