[HN Gopher] Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with car...
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Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships
Author : prostoalex
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-08-27 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| joshuaheard wrote:
| I love this idea. Airships development stalled over the fear of
| another Hindenbuerg. Buoyant could be a good alternative for this
| sort of transportation need.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Apparently they are getting ~70% of their lift from the buoyancy
| and ~30% from their propeller.
|
| In the video included in the article, they show their prototype
| flying. It is surprisingly lively for a blimp (I guess owing to
| the fact that it gets/needs lift from the propeller), darting
| around in an almost fish-like fashion. I dunno, still skeptical
| but the video does make it seem much more plausible, at least.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| This has been on here a few days ago.
|
| I didn't want to say anything, but have been thinking about the
| payload. I belive it's 675 lbs.
|
| That is not much. A truck can deliver thousands of pounds. (I
| have weight on my mind because I have to pick up a 800 lb mill,
| and bring it home in one piece.)
|
| It might make sense in Alaska delivering small amounts of
| material though, but not near power lines.
| drewrv wrote:
| 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.
| elihu wrote:
| The idea is they aren't delivering to houses directly, they're
| moving packages between shipping facilities. So, they can
| presumably having landing pads on either side that aren't near
| power lines.
|
| 675 pounds isn't much, but if you have a high-priority delivery
| that's not very heavy it might make a lot of sense. Especially
| in remote places; they're particularly interested in serving
| places that are currently served by planes and helicopters,
| like remote locations in Alaska.
| joefigura wrote:
| Yup, this is basically it. It's impossible to compete with a
| truck that's fully loaded, but there are tons of short middle
| mile trips where trucks aren't fully loaded (LTL or less-
| than-truckload freight). This type of freight is surprisingly
| inefficient, particularly in low density areas.
| abakker wrote:
| 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?
| thrill wrote:
| Wind is generally able to be forecast fairly well today.
| Applications sensitive to wind, especially to gusts, as light
| weight large side area vehicles will be, are going to be not
| usable when it's gusty. But that doesn't mean they're going to
| be not usable often enough to not be cost effective, and there
| may be options suitable to the specific mission to, for
| example, deliver a package simply nearby instead of at the
| destination.
|
| There's also other design shapes, one of which I'm a little
| familiar with being Skylifter, that is saucer shaped. Their
| target audience is heavy lift, but they were very intent on
| minimizing wind effects and so chose that shape.
|
| This specific shape though will be suitable a lot of the time
| for a lot of missions, and may even be more cost effective than
| a different shape - my non-CFD'd thought here is that the long
| skinny shape will likely get more lift from flow than a saucer.
| Maybe someone has done that research, as I'd love to read
| through it.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| The top speed can be taken as simply relative to a constant
| wind speed. Say they have a max speed of 30mph heading against
| the wind at 25mph. The net will simply be 5mph aka super slow.
|
| Gusty wind is more complex as it depends on cumulative drag
| factor. You can estimate their forward drag by knowledge about
| the motors they are using (energy -> drag work).
|
| Likely, unless their motors are tiny, the even the forward drag
| is quite high. This is why their max speed is not something
| like 300km/h.
|
| TLDR: its just like airplanes only much worse
| joefigura wrote:
| One clarification, the full-scale version's max speed is ~75
| mph, and typical cruise speeds will be 50-60 mph. The 35 mph
| number in the article is our subscale prototype. We loose range
| in a headwind, but on most days the aircraft has more than
| enough range to complete our target missions. And on the days
| the weather's too bad to fly, many other small aircraft are
| grounded too. - Joe from Buoyant
| EMM_386 wrote:
| They responded to my question about this here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278849
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| 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 of the 76
| aboard.
| jen20 wrote:
| This is a neat idea. I did spend the time while the page loaded
| wondering "wow, a service mesh to cargo airships is quite the
| leap" however!
| glitchcrab wrote:
| Yeah I had the same confusion when the Launch thread was
| posted. Choosing company names is hard.
| joefigura wrote:
| The full company name is "Buoyant Aero" for that reason! We
| often shorten it to Buoyant, but may use the full name more
| if it's a recurring point of confusion.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| Their Launch HN thread from 4 days ago has some interesting
| discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278515
| joefigura wrote:
| Thanks for linking! Cool to see this on HN again
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Buoyant has built and flown four prototype airships. The most
| recent sub-scale ship that went to air is 20 feet long, with
| airspeeds of up to 35 miles per hour and a payload capacity of 10
| pounds, but the ultimate aim is to build an airship that's
| capable of delivering up to 650 pounds of cargo at a cruise speed
| of around 60 miles per hour.
|
| For depot to depot delivery, how does that compare with an 18
| wheeler truck with 30,000 lbs carrying capacity going down the
| road at 60 miles per hour?
| not-my-account wrote:
| 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.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8
| ummonk wrote:
| 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.
| elihu wrote:
| In their Q&A thread the other day I believe they said that
| helium price isn't likely to impact them all that much in the
| short term. Maybe they'll use hydrogen at some point in the
| future, but it seems like they don't think it's necessary for
| their business model to work, given the relatively small size
| of their airships.
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(page generated 2021-08-27 23:00 UTC)