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Blimps in Agricultural Crop Production: A Recent Initiative
Published in K. R. Krishna, Aerial Robotics in Agriculture, 2021
This chapter focuses on airships that are colloquially called ‘Blimps’ and ‘Zeppelins.’ Blimps are the non-rigid airships inflated with lighter-than-air gas. A blimp collapses if deflated. Zeppelins are lighter-than-air aircrafts provided with a rigid aluminum or wooden framework. Let us begin with history of the words ‘Blimp’ and ‘Zeppelin,’ their etymology and how the terms were coined. Origin of the word blimp is related to military usage. Initially, lighter-than-air airships were designated as type A-Limp (‘Limp Bags’). A second version of airships were designated type-B-Limp. For short they were called ‘B-limp or Blimp.’ There are a couple of more suggestions about the derivation of the word ‘blimp.’ It seems Commander of the Capelle-Ferne Airship Station, R. N. Cunningham went inspecting airships in 1915. The airship produced a sound ‘blimp’ whenever he flipped his fingers on the body of the ship. Hence, they gave a nickname to non-rigid airships as ‘blimps’ in 1915. Next, it seems anti-submarine airships were first called as ‘blimps,’ during 1915. The Oxford Dictionary lists the word ‘Blimp.’ It is explained as an airship that is non-rigid and is inflated with lighter-than-air gas (History Forum, 2018; Editor, 2018a; Vaeth, 1992). The rigid airships filled with lighter-than-air gas is known as ‘Zeppelin.’ Zeppelin is a word coined sometime in 1930s. It is derived from its inventor, Ferdinand Zeppelin.
Tubular polythene film balloons for load lifting in the construction, mining and recreation industries
Published in Australian Journal of Multi-Disciplinary Engineering, 2022
Gas filled balloons, Zeppelins, capable of lifting 200 tonnes, were used for trans Atlantic commercial passenger flights in the 1930s and smaller balloons are currently used for recreational flights and atmospheric observations. Traditionally, balloons for lifting loads are near spherical in shape and manufactured from nylon fabric cut into segments and joined to form a spherical envelope. This paper considers the practicality of using blow moulded plastic tubes as balloon envelopes in place of spherical envelopes. Blow moulding is an industrial scale process to form plastic film (Dienamics 2017). Molten plastic is extruded from a circular die with an air flow at the centre to form a plastic bubble. This is drawn up to extend the bubble into a continuous thin film tube and, as the film cools and solidifies, the tube is wound onto a roll. The resulting plastic tubing has widespread use in the packaging industry for bagging materials or, when the tube is slit on one side, to form plastic sheeting. The advantage of tubular plastic is that a closed envelope can be formed simply by sealing the ends of the tube; potentially a process much less expensive than the multiple processes of fabric manufacture, segment cutting and manual segment joining required to form spherical balloon envelopes. The only current use for tubular balloons is carrying propaganda leaflets across borders (Figure 1) with loads of about 10 kg; the tubular balloons are about 12 m long and 1.2 m diameter (Guardian 2020). However, as blow moulding can produce tubes up to 4 m in diameter, we show in this paper how multiple, large diameter, tubular balloons could be combined to lift very much larger loads. The potential for fuel and emission reduction in deep open cut mining by using spherical balloons to lift ore has been outlined by Edmonds (2020). This paper develops the theory of load lifting with gas-filled tubular balloons and applies the theory in applications involving loads in 0.1–100 tonne range. The applications considered include lifting at difficult to access construction sites, recreational ballooning, and deep open cut mining. Section 2 derives the basic theory of lifting with tubular gas filled envelopes. Section 3 outlines methods for forming closed envelopes from thin film plastic tubing. Section 4 applies the theory to predict the performance and cost of gas filled tubular envelopes in recreational, construction and mining operations. Section 5 is a summary and conclusion.