Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Presentation
Slide 1
Hot air balloons and Airships.
Slide 2
Ballooning started in France in 1783 by the Montgolfier brothers. They were local paper manufactures that noticed how when they burnt paper the smoke caused the paper to lift. They thought that the heat and smoke had a special lifting quality, which put there minds to creating a craft that would capture smoke and heat to lift it off the ground. They used paper to create the craft; this is why today we call the fabric part of a balloon the ‘Envelope’
The 1st balloon also used gondolas as baskets; some even had oars and sails. Today you may hear the basket sometimes being called the gondola.
Henri Geffard was a French engineer and inventor. He built and flew the first full size airship. The flight took place on September 24th, 1852, he traveled 17 miles. The airship was a cigar shaped nonridged bag that had a capacity of 113,000 cubic feet and was 44 metre’s long.
It has a 2.2 kilowatt steam engine which drove its propeller and it had a gondola that was suspended from a pole attatched to the net surrounding the balloon.
This air ship had to carry a 45.5 kilogram boiler and the coke to fire it.
Slide 3
The Hindenburg
The Hindenburg is one of the most well known airships known for its explosion that took place on Thursday May 6th 1937.
35 people out of the 97 people on board died as well as one fatality on the ground. The cause remains unknown although there have been many speculations: eg, Sabotage, mechanical failure, hydrogen explosions, lightning or even the possibility that it was shot from the sky.
Many people believed that the Hindenburg has been sabotaged to harm hitlers nazi regime, it was thought that a bomb had be placed on the ship and detonated by someone on board.
The most widely believed cause of the explostion was that with helium being a highly flammable gas, a simple spark could have set it off, after looking into it closer, it was said that the drop lines were capable of carrying static electricity back up to the air ship causing and explotion.
Slide 4
The future of hot air balloons
Over the last couple of 100 year hot air balloons haven’t really changed that much, the basic design is still the same although we have know started to use different shapes and even characters to promote companies and to just look nice, as well as the method of inflating the balloon.
The one area that is needing to be looked into, changed and adapted to keep up with the world of today is the fuel and gasses used, we need to find a more sustainable source of power.
Slide 5
In the UK and most of Europe liquid propane is used to inflate and fly the balloon, whereas places such as Africa use a butane mix as propane is hard to come by.
The propane we use is the same as you'd get from petrol stations if your car ran on gas, and some houses, farms and businesses would use it also. Although they would take the vapor from the top of the tank.
Propane is produced as a by product of two other processes, Natural gas processing and petroleum refining.
Propane is heavier than air, If it leaks near anything with an electrical current is can cause an explosion.
Airships run off LTA gasses, This Stands for lighter than air.
Im not sure what gasses are with in this group.
Slide 6
Biogas
Biogas systems use bacteria to break down wet organic matter like animal dung, human sewage and food waste. This creates biogas, which is a combination of methane and carbon dioxide, and also a semi-solid residue. The biogas is used as a fuel for cooking, lighting or generating electricity.
The combination of methane and carbon dioxide mixed with oxygen and a catalyst will create the same out come as propane but by using biogas.
Slide 7
After deciding that there isn’t a massive different between a hot air balloons and airships I have come up with two ideas along the lines of both. The affects propane have on the environment and biogases and how airships could become our futures homes
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