Design principle

To build a successful blimp, you need to follow some basic design principles.

Design principle involves two aspects:

  • Payload estimate and checking: Whether the designed airship can be effectively suspended in the air.
  • Motion primitives checking: Whether the designed blimp can effectively move in the 3D space

Please use following checkbox to see if your design satisfy these principles:

Principle 1: To allow the designed airship to maintain neutral buoyancy in the air. You need to make sure the following equation satisfied:

\[ F_B - m_{total} = 0 \]

where,

  • \(F_B​\) is the buoyancy produced by your designed airship

  • \(m_{total}\) is the total lifting capacity of your designed airship

  • \(m_{total} = m_{elec} + m_{envelop} + m_{sup} + m_{payload}\)

The lifting capacity can be divided into the weight of electronics, balloon envelope(Note: this is not something you can ignore), support materials and payload.

Here requires one figure

Principle 2: To satisfy the needs of exploring the space, your design needs to satisfy the basic motion primitives:

  • Maintaining forward speed. The blimp should be able to maintain a desired constant forward speed while having zero vertical speed and zero yaw angular speed.
  • Changing altitude: The blimp should be able to ascend or descend to the desired height.
  • Changing orientation: The blimp should be able to spin in place so that its yaw angle can be stabilized at any desired value.

Here requires one figure