Sami Majadla - Pedepelin
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Transcript of Sami Majadla - Pedepelin
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Sami Majadla
ES 147Idea Translation Lab
November 16, 2009
The Future of Leisurely Aviation
Since the beginning of history, humankind has always wanted to fly. Many civilizations
and tribes have learned how to sail across the seas and trek across the continents, but none have
been able to master the skies until quite recently. The first serious attempt in Western history to
analyse flight was made by Aristotle around 350 BC. He maintained that an object, such as an
arrow, could continue to move through the air only as long as a force was applied to it, and that
once this force was withdrawn, the object would stop. (Dalton, 14) Since Aristotle couldnt
conceive of any way that one could apply a force on an arrow from a distance (gravity was a
discovery to be made much later by Sir Isaac Newton), he concluded that things that fly must be
powered by something physically connected to them. With birds, bats, and insects, its pretty
obvious that the source of this power the muscles that allow them to flap their wings. However,
with the arrow, Aristotle hypothesized that the air must be what allows arrows to fly.
Specifically, he argued [that an arrow] travelled through the air by being pushed along by the
air rushing in to fill the vacuum behind it. He presumed that the air sustained the flight of the
arrow rather than retarded it (Dalton, 14), and believed that objects wouldnt be able to fly in a
vacuum because there wouldnt be air to push it along. Of course today, rockets and satellites
prove that this notion is false, and people understand that air is a cause for friction, not
propulsion.
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Leonardo da Vinci was the first to challenge Aristotles idea of airs impact on flight
(Dalton, 15), and instead proposed correctly that there was such a thing as air resistance (Allen,
4). Leonardo also made numerous designs for flying machines, though they were all either
helicopters or ornithopters (flapping wing devices). None of them would have been able to fly,
however, because he didnt understand the fundamentals of aerodynamics (Allen, 4) , and
becauseat least for the ornithoptershumans dont have a physiology that would allow us to
either flap fast enough or be light enough to stay sustained in the air (Shevell, 2). It wasnt until
Sir Isaac Newton that anybody theorized that air was a fluid like water (albeit a gas, not a liquid).
He did quite a bit to further the field of fluid dynamics, essentially setting forth the path for
airplanes that used air resistance to fly to be built, but unfortunately for him, his work was
ignored by the flight industry for its first century of existence.
In 1782, the Montgolfier brothers were gazing at the sparks and smoke that rose in their
fireplace, and thought of the idea of using a flame to carry a balloon of sorts into the sky. A year
later, the first manned flight ever took place in Paris, when a hot air balloon created by said
brothers traveled 5 miles across the city. A week after that, the French physicist J.A.C. Charles
flew the very first hydrogen balloon, also in Paris (Anderson, 5). It was finally proven that it was
possible for humans to fly, and hot-air balloon and hydrogen or helium filled dirigibles became
new vehicles that mankind could use. Until the early 20th century, they remained as more or less
the sole form of aerial transportation. Even with the rise of popularity in airplanes, it wasnt until
the Hindenburg disaster in 1937 that airships lost their significance in the aerial world.
However, there was a reason that lighter-than-air craft (LTA) attracted people for so long
before airplanes were built: they are simple and easy to understand. Anybody whos ever floated
in a body of water or, at least in todays day and age, held a helium balloon in their hands can get
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Engine driven airship
Pedal powered airship
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The zeppelin that I would like to build, called a pedepelin (or a zepedalin) to make the
combination of the pedal and zeppelin systems clear, would first and foremost be a lot smaller
than the examples given above. This is mainly because material science has come a long way
over the past century, and the envelope and undercarriage of the pedepelin can be significantly
lighter than what somebody in the early 1900s would have been able to create. Also unlike the
zeppelins of more than a century ago, the pedepelin would also have the ability to control its
height using ballastsbags of air inside the envelope that can be inflated and deflated to increase
or decrease the overall weight of the craft. In my model of the aircraft, the mechanism that would
be used to both pump air in and out of these ballasts would be controlled by the same pedal that
controls the propulsion of the LTA as a whole. There would be a simple three-way gear system
that would allow for the pilot to switch control between either horizontal movement of the
vehicle, upward movement (releasing air from the ballasts), or downward movement (adding air
to the ballasts). On top of that, there would be a 21 gear system to control the actual work that
the pedal itself does, more or less identical to what bikes today use. Below is a mock-up of the
above description:
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The big question comes in regards to the exact material that a machine of this sort would
be built from. While the gas that has been used in dirigible envelopes has been exclusively
helium for a while, I dont think that it would be such a bad idea to look into using hydrogen.
Zeppelins like the Hindenburg flew for thousands upon thousands of miles just fine without any
issues, so hydrogen will definitely be able to keep an airship afloat. The fact that its flammable
is the only reason not to use it, and in the pedepelin, this may not be such a big deal. Unlike the
Hindenburg and other large zeppelins, the pedepelin doesnt have engines, nor anything of any
kind that could potentially cause a spark that would blow the whole thing up. In fact, the only
moving parts that would be near the envelope itself (where the hydrogen is stored) would be the
pumps for the ballasts, which would be several layers of fabric removed from the helium. Some
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things that might cause a fire would be lightning, which wont ever be a problem because it
would be impossible to fly an LTA like this in a storm in the first place, missiles and other
weaponry, which again, I dont think will be a real problem, or sparks rising from a forest fire,
which I feel should be easy enough to avoid. In fact, the biggest fear of a fire would be a pilot
flying the airship who is smoking a cigarette and somehow manages to get said cigarette caught
in the gear mechanism while pumping the ballasts, which would end up taking said cigarette up
near the envelope, possibly burning through some of the fabric if the pilot stopped pedaling when
it got there, which would then cause the entire envelope to explode. As such, we can simply
make smoking and flying a pedepelin mutually exclusive activities.
The envelope itself would have to be made from polyvinyl fluoride (PVF)an incredibly
strong, weather and chemical resistant fabric that burns very slowy. It is what is currently used at
least in part for many airship envelopes, along with various parts of numerous planes and several
spacecrafts. There would be several hooks around the sides of the envelope in order to suspend
the seating and the pedaling system, along with the pilot, from the actual airship.
Quantities and price breakdown
Hydrogen weighs about 0.0857 kg/cubic meter. As such, when it is in an envelope
suspended in air, it will have a general buoyancy of about 1.1399 kg/cubic meter, since airs
weight can be averaged to about 1.2256 kg/cubic meter. Tedlar, one of the leading brands of
PVF fabric in the world, weighs about 2 kg/meter squared when it is a mil thick.
Say, for example, we wanted to create a perfectly round envelope rather than the cigar
shaped ones that are more maneuverable (this is simply to make calculations easier). We could
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give it a radius of 6m, which when filled with hydrogen would give us an upward lift of almost
1031.5 kg. The surface area, however, is 452.4 meters squared, which gives us a total weight of
around 904.5 kg. Therefore, an envelope of this size would be able to lift up to 127kg on top of
the envelope, which would be more than enough for a human being (for whom the average
weight is somewhere around the 70 or 75 kg mark), a seat, a pedal, a propeller, nylon fabric for
ballasts, and a light aluminum framework.
Of course less space could be used if other fabrics were used in tandem to make the
envelope lighter, or if a thinner layer were to be used. I havent done enough research yet on
light materials that can be woven into an envelope that can contain gases like hydrogen or
helium, and that would be one of the most important next steps that I could take. In the amounts
described above, the PVF would cost a total of around $85,000, and that would be by far the
biggest cost of the pedepelin. To add a structure to the envelope to get it into a desirable
aerodynamic shape and to add the hydrogen we need, a pedaling system, ballasts, airpumps, and
a propeller would probably raise the total price of the system to be just above $100,000 (mainly
because wed need more PVF to get a sleeker shape). Of course this price can go up or down
depending on whether or not the quality of the fabric that is discussed here is up to par or not. It
also wouldnt be too expensive to replace this system with an actual engine (at least for the
propeller).
While this may seem like a lot of money, it is quite cheap in comparison to other options
out there. The next cheapest non-hot-air based airship is already above $2,000,000, and the
closest comparable airship in terms of price is the Skyacht, a hot-air blimp that will be selling for
around $150,000 in the near future (personalblimp.com). While hot-air blimps have the benefit
of being able to use much lighter materials since air leakage isnt something they have to worry
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about as much, the envelopes themselves need to be much larger, since hot air isnt anywhere
near as light as hydrogen or helium are. Of course as a result of hot-air blimp envelopes being
open, they can be completely deflated and rolled up when not in use, allowing for a much easier
transport of the blimp from place to place. At the same time, however, once unfurled and flying
through the air, hot air blimps cant maneuver quite as well as rigid zeppelins can.
Project Future
While building and flying a pedepelin as described above is much cheaper than what is
readily available today, it isnt quite as cheap and definitely not as small as I was hoping a flying
bicycle of sorts would be. As such, there were other designs that I considered. These designs fell
mostly into two different categories. The first was one where the envelope was designed to be
able to lift just below total weight of the aircraft, and other supplementary systems would be
used to keep the machine as a whole afloat. There were two different hybrid airships that
combined zeppelin and helicopter technologies that I thought of. They are both relatively similar
to two different designs that are in existence. One is the Piasecki PA-97, which crashed after
several months of testing due to a structural failure, and the other is the SkyHook JHL-40, which
is currently in development as a collaboration between SkyHook International and. Both are
pictured below:
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Piasecki PA-97
SkyHook JHL-40
Both of my helicopter/airship hybrids are drawn below. For propulsion, they would either
be linked with an extra vertical propeller like the pedepelin design, or the horizontal rotors would
have the ability to tilt in different directions to allow for horizontal movement.
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Another design that is fundamentally similar to the above two is one that combines
ornithopter and airship technologies to create more farfetched aircraft like the one below. Since
almost the entirety of the lift (like the other hybrids I drew above) would be achieved by the
envelope, it shouldnt be too hard to be able to achieve flight with large wings made of feathers
(or another decent material) and a strong spring system. It would also be cool to design and paint
the whole system to look like a bird so that the pilot would essentially be flying in a giant
feathered creature.
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Just to be clear, in all the of the aforementioned systems, when not pedaling to keep either the
wings or the copter blades in motion (depending on what the model is), the airship would begin
to descend.
The second category of flying machines that I thought might be worth pursuing is one
that is a bit simpler than the above examples. Its a design where one, to put it simply, attaches a
significant amount of helium balloons and a propeller to an object such as a bike (ala the Pixar
movie Up). This seems like it would be technically much less challenging than building a true
airship, and it would be a lot cheaper to produce as well. Getting down would simply involve
either shooting some balloons with a pellet gun or cutting their attachment from the frame of the
bike. Similar things have been done numerous times with furniture (such as lawn chairs) or
harnesses. In fact, it is a common enough practice that it has earned itself a titlecluster
ballooning. Why not try the same thing with a bike? Whether its feasible or not, it certainly
would be really fun to be able to fly for cheap. What the research that Ive done so far for this
project has taught me, however, is that I need to do quite a bit more before I can claim to have a
design that is worth pursuing further.
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Works Cited
Allen, John E.Aerodynamics the science of air in motion. London: Granada, 1982. Print.
Anderson, John David.Introduction to flight. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985. Print.
Dalton, Stephen. The Miracle of Flight. London: Merrell, 2006. Print.
Personal Blimp Frequently Asked Questions. Skyacht Aircraft, 2008. Web. 17 Nov. 2009.
.
Shevell, Richard Shepherd. Fundamentals of flight. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1983. Print.