Steerable draft
After retiring from military service in 1890 , the airship designer Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin made his first conceptual considerations for the construction of airships under the concept of steerable drafts . The draft never got beyond the conception phase. The considerations made, however, provided the technical and dimensional basis for airships implemented later, in particular the first airship Zeppelin 1 .
history
Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin retired from military service at an early age in 1890 at the age of 52 and then turned seriously to the development of an airship. Together with Theodor Kober , the count began to consider airships in the following years, which resulted in the concept of a steerable draft in February 1894 and which were published in a "memorandum on the steerable airship". On August 13, 1898, he received a patent for a “steerable aerial vehicle with several supporting bodies arranged one behind the other” (Imperial Patent Office, patent specification No. 98580).
Technical conception
The design, which was protected by the patent retroactively to August 31, 1895, had the following important features, but never got beyond the conception phase, so that the draft was never built:
- Gas space divided into several cylindrical cells,
- Control possibility with the help of elevators and rudders ,
- two separate gondolas firmly connected to the frame,
- Propulsion by propellers , mounted at the height of the greatest air resistance,
- Possibility to couple several such ships like train wagons together
The aircraft should have a total length of 117.5 and a diameter of 11 m and reach a maximum speed of 32 km / h.
Influence on the history of airship travel
The basic idea of a steerable draft was also taken up by other inventors in the following decades. The Krefeld inventor Theodor Zorn , for example, began in 1909 to design a tripartite air worm. The middle balloon should have a length of 60, the two outer balloons each have a length of 30 m with a diameter of 13.8 m. After the project was presented at the International Aviation Exhibition in Frankfurt in 1909 and a company was founded in Hamburg in the summer of 1910, the inventor Zorn obtained technical expertise from the engineer Hugo Kromer in 1911 . Through his work, the design developed more and more into an airship of conventional design, so it was ultimately never realized.
Recent developments
A research group at the University of Stuttgart developed a similar construction in 2001 and was able to actually test the flight characteristics in the laboratory under laboratory conditions. This project, known as the “airworm”, is intended to be used within long-term stratospheric missions, for example for air surveillance. The company TAO, a spin-off from the University of Stuttgart, wanted to manufacture this airworm and operate it commercially. A few years later, TAO partnered with the US company Sanswire to construct a 111-foot-long airship called the Sanswire-TAO STS-111 . No more recent information on this project is available until mid-2012.
literature
- Wolfgang Meighörner : Basis of Success. The steerable draft . In the S. (Ed.): Airships that were never built . Verlag Gessler, Friedrichshafen 2002, pp. 13-29, ISBN 3-86136-076-4 (catalog of the exhibition of the same name, Zeppelin Museum , Friedrichshafen, June 21 to September 15, 2002).
Individual evidence
- ^ Wolfgang Meighörner: Basis of Success. The steerable draft . In: Ders .: Airships that were never built , p. 16f.
- ^ Wolfgang Meighörner: Basis of Success. The steerable draft . In the S. (Ed.): Airships that were never built , p. 25.
- ↑ J. Bleibler: Rigid airship projects in Germany 1908 to 1914 . In: Wolfgang Meighörner (Ed.): Airships that were never built , p. 45 ff.
- ↑ o. Author. (2001): The Airworm stratospheric airship . In: The Airship Association (Ed.): Airship , No. 134, o. O. 2001, p. 8
- ↑ http://www.tao-group.de/presse.html
- ↑ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/08/gallery-blimps-of-war/?pid=597