Soldato
HAV's Airlander 10 has go ahead for full production from the CAA.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-46810151
Where's my space plane?
- Thread starter ChroniC
- Start date
HAV's Airlander 10 has go ahead for full production from the CAA.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-46810151
Soldato
I wish it didn't look quite so much like a bottom, but the mock-ups for the inside look good:
This was the dining area of the Hindenburg:
Now it was obviously for the wealthy but the point is that with airships it's doable. Can you imagine a jet that could accommodate the above and be financially viable?
But ultimately, I want to travel in something like this:
i love airships, would love to have a go in one. they had trips over the city years back when we had the centenary celebrations but i didn't get the chance. doubt commercial travel would ever be of the standard h4rm0ny wants - firstly the craft would have to be phenomenally massive, and secondly, like jets, airlines would just cram more and more people in to make money. could certainly see the airship encroaching on the cruise ship scene though, especially in areas where an aerial view would be more beneficial. haulage of massive/unwieldy items is where airships shine though, i believe Zeppelin are already building a huge cargo carrier.
Soldato
Would love to see that in action.
Lockheed Martin are developing a commercial cargo hauler airship (or have done). Can land on land or land on water, apparently. And uses 1/10th the fuel a helicopter does. Imagine if they'd had these during the California wildfires or if they could be used in developing countries with poorer road networks. I'd love to go floating over Kenya in one of these. I bet they're a lot quieter inside than jets as well.
EDIT: Here are the little robots LM designed to crawl around on the airship's surface and look for leaks.
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Soldato
We need iron man suits for personal transportation and wormholes/stargates/transporters/teleporters for instant transport to Australia or wherever.
Soldato
Caporegime
The police could order some very large butterfly nets.Who the #### is going to stop you when you have a jetpack
Caporegime
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First time i've been in this thread...
Isn't that a good thing? Who likes crowded beaches?
Soldato
I'm fairly certain 16 Regt RA would happily deploy for a moving target exercise.
Caporegime
I think there needs to be a balance between space and a decent smattering of bikini’d up bronzed Sheila’s playing volleyball.
Man of Honour
A hydrogen fuel cell is just one type of battery. It's a crappy type of battery because it's a monumentally wasteful way of transferring energy from one place to another. "The environmental lobby" you refer to is right about it. Wrong about many things, but right about this.
Advocates of fuel cells like to view the final energy conversion process alone, but that is just plain wrong. Even that part isn't very good in terms of efficiency, but it is the best part. The rest is far, far worse. Firstly, there's obtaining elemental hydrogen in the first place. Sure, hydrogen is superabundant pretty much everywhere. But it's all bonded to other elements. Breaking that bond requires far more energy than you get from running the hydrogen through a fuel cell - it's an extremely inefficient form of energy transportation. But that's only the start of it. You have to move the hydrogen from where it's manufactured to refuelling stations, which requires more energy. In addition, there's the issue of storing hydrogen. Its density at atmospheric pressure and temperature is so low that it's ludicrously impractical to store it, so it either has to be stored under very high pressure or at very low temperature. Both require even more energy and introduce additional hazards. On top of that, it's fundamentally difficult to store hydrogen at all because it seeps through most containers and damages many materials. It's fundamentally easier and more efficient to move energy in the form of electricity than in the form of hydrogen. Finally, there's the requirement for rare materials for catalysts, which would prevent hydrogen fuel cells from being used on a large scale anyway even if all the other problems somehow disappeared.
There are some theoretically possible scenarios in which hydrogen fuel cells would be viable, but they don't exist in practice and might never do. You'd need such an abundance of surplus electricity that you don't have to care about wasting loads of it on manufacturing elemental hydrogen, maintaining it at extremely low temperatures all the time and pumping it around. Even if you somehow discovered a far less inefficient way of breaking the bonds between hydrogen and other elements, you'd still need a big surplus of electricity to waste on maintaining huge quantities of hydrogen at very low temperatures all the time and pumping it around. That sort of scenario might exist as a side effect of practical nuclear fusion, if that ever exists. Even in such a favourable hypothetical scenario, what would be the point? It's just another type of battery and not a very good one at that. Why create a massive infrastructure for it when there's already one that works for moving electricity around in the form of electricity?
Hydrogen fuel cells are like flying cars - great for sci-fi programs with enough suspension of disbelief but not a good idea in the real world.
That's an interesting idea. I think it could be sold as a luxury. Not just in the obvious terms of the conditions during the flight, but also in terms of the time taken. The much longer flight time could be marketed as a status symbol - you're rich enough to not have to hurry. On shorter flights in many areas it could be pitched against driving. I think that would fly very well (every pun intended!) in places where relatively long journeys by car aren't particularly rare. The USA, for example. The travel time would be comparable but the airship could be a much more comfortable way to travel. The airship would be a bit faster, but there would be some additional travel time to and from airship ports. Generally comparable overall, I think.
I think airships are arguably more viable than sub-orbital hypersonic flights. Sure, they reduce the flight time a fair bit, but they reduce the travel time by a much smaller proportion. You still have to travel from where you are to the airport, go through all the embarking procedure, go through all the disembarking procedure and travel from the airport to where you want to go. If it's urgent, well, use video conferencing instead. That's vastly faster. So where's the market? That's largely why we don't still have supersonic passenger flight. We used to (Concorde) and we easily could again, but it's not worth it.
Soldato
Um, you know that Toyota has a commercial HFC car on the roads right now? You know that there are HFC busses on the streets of Tokyo and Aberdeen and London? There's a HFC car-sharing service in Wales. Mercades-Benz is manufacturing HFC lorries right now. Hyundai just signed a contract to supply 1,000 HFC lorries to Zurich council (iirc). Engineers and business people at Toyota are investing a couple of billion+ in this technology in the hopes that Nuclear Fusion will suddenly make it practical. They know a lot more about it than you and think it's viable.
This is the Hyundai Nexo. It's mainly driven in Korea but it's being launched commercially in the UK this year:
500 mile range and refuels in a few minutes. Try finding a battery-powered SUV that comes close to that!
To address your other comments in bullet point fashion:
- The point of HFC is that its energy density is far greater than any current battery product and battery advancement is slowing down. A HFC vehicle has vastly greater range and can refuel in under a minute as opposed to the long charging periods of batteries.
- Both batteries and HFC are means of energy transportation and significantly less efficient than petrol. But they're both viable.
- High-temperature electrolysis can produce hydrogen very efficiently. You know what has electricity and huge amounts of super-heated water in abundance? Nuclear power stations. HFC is the perfect companion to nuclear power and nuclear power is the most environmentally friendly, efficient power source we know and which has widespread fuel sources in non-regime, developed countries like Canada and Australia. You can have an integrated power structure and it would be efficient.
- Hydrogen is hard to store, yes. But is it impractically so? No. So your hydrogen tank in your car goes from 100% to 60% if you leave it in the garage for four months. Big woo! Is it a big problem? No.
- Hydrogen is actually safer to store in many ways than petrol. You have a petrol leak you get accumulations of explosive vapour (petrol fumes are heavier than air so it pools) whereas Hydrogen, lightest of all elements, vanishes upwards. You're never going to open your garage or find a petrol station filled with dangerously ignitable vapour or puddles of fuel with hydrogen because of the advantage that it's hard to contain. The moment hydrogen leaks, hydrogen is gone. It burns hot, but for an instant. In the highly unlikely event of a leak and ignition (seriously - when's the last time you actually saw a car's petrol tank go up?), you get a narrow, vertical flame that burns out in a second or two. As opposed to the fireball you get with pooled petrol vapour. Seriously - in many ways Hydrogen is far safer to store than petrol and we manage petrol just fine.
- HFC's output is water. And when a tank eventually degrades (maybe over 15-20 years for a commercial car like Toyota's MIRA), you recycle the metal and make it into a new tank. When a battery degrades (over a lot less than 15 years), you have a complex process of reclaiming the materials and disposing of toxic parts. And shipping around a big store of Hydrogen is a lot more energy efficient than truckloads of heavy batteries. Hydrogen is more environmentally friendly than batteries.
- The only way in which Hydrogen is not more environmentally friendly is that currently, because it's cheap, people use a by-product of fossil fuels to source it. But there's no reason it can't be produced efficiently by High Temperature Electrolysis.
- HFCs can be added to existing infrastructure. It's a modest cost to install an extra specialist fuel-pump and small tank at an existing garage. And that garage can increase capacity incrementally as demand ramps up. That's rather different to suddenly adding major additional demands on our electricity network.
- As to "rare materials" required. You're comparing them to batteries of all things?
Now, in the face of HFC vehicles actually being real commercial things that you could go out and buy right now, which based on your comments about nuclear fusion and "hypothetical scenarios" I think you weren't aware of, will you revise your position or find ways to reject the things I've listed? Mostly what it ends up being is someone posting a flow-chart graphic they've google'd up showing the HFC energy storage process is less efficient than charging a battery. Something that strips away all context of the production of the battery, the downsides of reduced range and increased fueling times, the cheapness of HT electrolysis and value of far greater energy density.
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Man of Honour
As I said:
I've highlighted where you and I are saying the same thing.
You're fine with wasting vast amounts of electricity on a ludicrously inefficient way to move electricity around. I'm not. As you and I have both said, it would be possible to do it only if practical nuclear fusion existed (and on a very large scale).
By the way, the materials needed for the catalysts for HFCs are far more rare than the materials needed for batteries. Also, the energy density of hydrogen is extemely low, not "far greater than any current battery product". As for hydrogen being safe from burning, the Hindenburg serves well as an infamous counter-example. Battery charging times can be negated as a problem by battery swapping and in practice they're less of a problem than they first seem because almost all daily driving is far less than the range on a single charge. But these are relatively minor points compared to the extreme wastefulness of using such an extremely inefficient way of moving electricity around.
I'm not saying that HFCs don't work. I'm saying that they don't work at all well. They're good publicity for vehicle manufacturers, as long as they're only on a very small scale. But they're not practical. They're only usable even on a very small scale because hydrogen is available as a waste product from oil refining.