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Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

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Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#41

Post by User23 »

ummonk wrote: post #14
not-my-account wrote: post #7

How would the moving price of Helium affect operations? Or rather, what would the range of Helium prices have to be in order to be profitable? The common trope is that "The world is running out of Helium", yet it seems like that is not actually true [1][2]. I'd be interested to hear how this is all being taken into account. [1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.2020060... [2] https://www.youtube.co…

We aren’t running out of helium in the short-medium term but it’s still definitely a limited resource and there is a legitimate concern about losing access to terrestrial helium once we’ve extracted all we can. Unlike fossil fuels, helium isn’t something we can synthesize from elements that are abundant on Earth.

Here's hoping we get that fusion reactor problem solved.

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#42

Post by joefigura »

gpm wrote: post #27
thepasswordis wrote: post #25

Okay I don't get it. In the launch HN, they said their craft is 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Doesn't that basically describe a semi truck? Or an airplane? So is the pitch here a way to eliminate the labor costs of trucking by going somewhere that doesn't have much to run into? The typical way that companies like FedEx solve this problem is with an airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's a…

You'll probably get a better answer from one of the people involved in the project, but I'll take a stab at this. The right comparison is an airplane not a semi-truck. If you can drive a semi somewhere it doesn't seem like this makes much sense. It carries substantially less (it looks like ~1/4 the mass), but it looks like you can buy more than 4 of these for the cost of 1 Cessna Caravan (wikipedia quotes a few milli…

Yep, this is a pretty accurate. If you have a full truckload of stuff, small air freight cannot compete. But if you're trying to move a single pallet, the airship is the best way to do it.

The one thing I'd add is that we deliberately chose 650 lbs to go a size class lower than a Cessna Caravan, because autonomy has enormous benefits for a 650 lb payload aircraft. At that size the pilot alone takes up 1/4 of your payload capacity!

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#43

Post by elihu »

amelius wrote: post #33
crote wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy to compete with a truck in some areas of Alaska: they simply aren't reachable by road! If freight has to be brought in either by boat or by plane, an autonomous blimp suddenly sounds like a great alternative.

Except if the weather conditions force you to delay the shipment.

...which can happen with planes and boats too.

Here's their take on the inherent tradeoffs of various transportation options in inclement weather:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278843

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#44

Post by jodrellblank »

bombcar wrote: post #36
chrisbrandow wrote: post #35

First question that comes to my mind is, “How much helium will this use if it scales”. Helium is still non-renewable, and it’s still pretty critical for MRIs among other critical analytical instruments. Probably insignificant. But it’s still the question I have.

Hydrogen can be made safe, and is renewable. For something like this to work we need to move past the Hindenburg.

> "Hydrogen can be made"

Piggy-backing on your comment at a tangent - how did they make such large quantities of Hydrogen in the early 1900s (and store and transport it safely)? This[1] has some interesting reading on it; there were gas cylinders but no standardisation of valves, not good lubricants for compressors, a different set of pipes for airship filling and airship topping-up, some stations which could remove and re-purify the Hydrogen, and two different methods of pre-war and post-war production are described.

This[2] has much more detailed history of the options, including a Popular Mechanics article from 1908.

[1] https://www.nevilshute.org/Engineering/AMBurgess/amb_hydroge...

[2] https://welweb.org/ThenandNow/Hydrogen%20Generation.html

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#45

Post by jodrellblank »

trothamel wrote: post #29
drewrv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much the airship itself will cost at scale. Since their plan is to be autonomous, and energy costs will be low, it seems the economics of this depend on the cost of the airship and maintenance. Put differently, if they’re cheap enough you could just buy 100 and ship 67,500 lbs a day.

Or to be put evem more differently, 100 airships could ship less than 2 40-foot shipping containers. (At least according to https://www.technogroupusa.com/size-and-weight-limit-laws/ , though I suspect density would be the limiting factor.)

Your link says a 40' container weighs 20,000kg. The Hindenburg alone could lift 232,000kg [1].

Bouyant needs to go bigger.

[1] https://erik-engheim.medium.com/calculating-lifting-capacity...

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#46

Post by jodrellblank »

MichaelGroves wrote: post #4
abakker wrote: post #3

Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust?

Wind will never not be a problem for airships. At best, modern weather radars and forecasting might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did. Incidentally, a lot of casual airship fans pin hopes on helium instead of hydrogen to keep airships safe. But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73…

> "might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did"

Not sure they wanted to; from [1]: "To maintain altitude, Hindenburg would brush against clouds and collect rainwater in gutters that fed the ballast tanks. If we passed through a shower every few hours there was no need to release gas. There were occasions when no rain was available, but we were rarely far from a suitable shower."

[1] https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/crossing-atlan...

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#47

Post by jodrellblank »

MichaelGroves wrote: post #4
abakker wrote: post #3

Can a physicist help me understand something here? Assuming each of these can carry ~650lbs at 30mph. They're 60feet long and have a VERY lightweight airframe. How would these craft deal with wind? do they just get blown away every time there is a gust?

Wind will never not be a problem for airships. At best, modern weather radars and forecasting might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did. Incidentally, a lot of casual airship fans pin hopes on helium instead of hydrogen to keep airships safe. But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73…

> "But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard."

Worse than that in fate's sense of irony, after the Hindenburg disaster the US authorities banned Hydrogen as a lifting gas and built the USS Shenandoah as a Helium airship. When a Hydrogen airship of that era flew too high it had valves at the top to vent Hydrogen to the atmosphere and reduce buoyancy, but Helium was 50x-100x more expensive and the Sheandoah had its valves sealed so the crew couldn't waste any of it. It hit a turbulent updraft, rose so high the gas pressure in the balloons was past spec, and this is suspected to have contributed to it breaking up and crashing, killing 14 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Shenandoah_%28ZR-1%29#Cras...

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#48

Post by bombcar »

nosianu wrote: post #38
bombcar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydrogen can be made safe, and is renewable. For something like this to work we need to move past the Hindenburg.

I think to have once read that World War I fights against Zeppelins showed that igniting the hydrogen proved to actually be quite hard. Only when they were able to open significant holes and used special ammunition did that work. Not enough hydrogen would escape and mix with air and remain in one place to accumulate to cause an explosion. There needed to be a big hole first for enough hydrogen to mix with air, plus t…

It’s lighter than air so the flames burn hot but the gas is going up too - and the ship is losing lift and going down at the same time. It’s a good combination if you have to be on fire.

The main key would be a gasbag that’s not flammable.

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#49

Post by bombcar »

jodrellblank wrote: post #44
bombcar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydrogen can be made safe, and is renewable. For something like this to work we need to move past the Hindenburg.

> " Hydrogen can be made " Piggy-backing on your comment at a tangent - how did they make such large quantities of Hydrogen in the early 1900s (and store and transport it safely)? This[1] has some interesting reading on it; there were gas cylinders but no standardisation of valves, not good lubricants for compressors, a different set of pipes for airship filling and airship topping-up, some stations which could remov…

It’s interesting that the answer everyone gives is the least effective and efficient way - electrolysis.

Sulfuric acid and iron into hydrogen is much simpler.

Re: Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

#50

Post by sandworm101 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #45
trothamel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or to be put evem more differently, 100 airships could ship less than 2 40-foot shipping containers. (At least according to https://www.technogroupusa.com/size-and-weight-limit-laws/ , though I suspect density would be the limiting factor.)

Your link says a 40' container weighs 20,000kg. The Hindenburg alone could lift 232,000kg [1]. Bouyant needs to go bigger. [1] https://erik-engheim.medium.com/calculating-lifting-capacity...

No. It had 232 tons of bouyancy. Most of that was taken up by its own mass. The amount it could lift, its payload, was a tiny fraction of that amount. Wikipedia says it could lift aprox 10,000kg. Roughly the 5% payload ratio of a typical space launch today.
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