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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
Balloon. History of invention and production
Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us An aerostat (simplified and not quite accurate - a balloon) is an aircraft lighter than air, using for flight the lift force of a gas (or heated air) enclosed in a shell with a density less than the density of the surrounding air (according to Archimedes' law). It is not known exactly when and where the first hot air balloon was raised. A sensational discovery was made in 1973: in the ancient country of the Incas, on the territory of modern Peru, an image of a balloon with a shell in the form of a tetrahedron with a double gondola suspended from below - a shuttle was found on rock paintings. Moreover, the stages of preparing the hot air balloon for flight, making a fire, filling the shell with hot air and making a flight were shown. Even the comparative dimensions of the shell were indicated. A balloon made according to this scheme by our contemporaries was lifted into the air, it turned out to be quite viable, gaining a height of one hundred meters in one minute. In the XIV century, the monk Albert of Saxony wrote that the smoke of a fire is much lighter than air and, due to the expansion of air under the influence of fire, rises in it. In the XNUMXth century, the English scientist Scaliger proposed to make a shell of the thinnest gold and fill it with hot air. A hundred years later, Cyrano de Bergerac's novel "Another Light, or States and Empires of the Moon" appeared, in which, along with a number of interesting projects for aircraft for air travel, a device similar to a hot air balloon is described. The hero of the novel, with the help of two hermetic, smoke-filled shells, flies almost to the Moon itself, where he releases smoke, and, using the shells as a parachute, calmly descends to its surface. In the first half of the XNUMXth century, according to the chronicle, the Ryazan clerk Kryakutny made a large ball, "poured it with filthy and smelly smoke, made a noose from it, sat down in it, and the evil spirit lifted it higher than a birch." And yet, it is customary to start counting from June 5, 1783, when in the French city of Annon, the brothers Etienne and Joseph Montgolfier raised a silk ball of 600 cubic meters into the air. The shell of the ball was covered with paper from the inside, and on its lower hole a lattice of vines was fixed, which was installed on the scaffolds. A fire was made under the stage, and hot air with smoke raised the ball to a height of two kilometers. That is why the name hot air balloon came about, in contrast to the charlier, named after Professor Charles, who launched a balloon filled with hydrogen on August 27, 1783.
The first human flight took place on November 21, 1783. A huge balloon 21 meters high with two daredevils on board smoothly lifted off the ground. Both aeronauts diligently kept the fire in the basket. The flight lasted 45 minutes and ended with a smooth descent outside the city at a distance of nine kilometers from the launch site. By the way, it is interesting to note that Joseph Montgolfier only once rose on a ball of his design, and his brother Etienne never!
Ten days after the rise of the first people on the hot air balloon, Professor Charles filled the shell with a diameter of eight meters with hydrogen and, together with his assistant Robert, entered the gondola suspended under the balloon. The flight lasted 2 hours 5 minutes and passed at an altitude of about 400 meters. After landing, Charles decided to continue the flight alone. Having landed Robert, he climbed to a height of 2 kilometers and half an hour later, releasing some of the hydrogen, made a soft landing. But ... leaving the gondola, Charles vowed "never again to expose himself to the dangers of such travel." Until the last day of his life, Charles disputed with Montgolfier the glory of the invention of the balloon - after all, the balloon with heated air was invented long before Montgolfier. Charles invented a rope net that encircles the ball and transfers weight loads to it, he invented a valve, an air anchor and was the first to use sand as a ballast, designed a barometer to measure height. Compared to the hot air balloon, the Charlier was a more advanced design. But the charliers also had a big drawback - to fill them, it is necessary to have a supply of gas lighter than air (hydrogen or helium) at the launch site, in a material-intensive container, and after the end of the flight, this gas must be released into the atmosphere. This increased the cost of operating balloons filled with hydrogen or helium. Ahead of the hot air balloons and charliers was a long way to the present day, nothing particularly remarkable, marked by short-term ups and downs until the second half of the XNUMXth century. The emergence of new heat-resistant materials for casings, efficient burners breathed a second life into them.
Soon after the second birth of balloons, combined designs appeared, combining the advantages of both traditional ones. The shell was divided into two parts. The upper one is filled with light and non-combustible helium, and the lower one is filled with hot air. By heating it during the flight with propane, ethane or kerosene, burned in special burners, aeronauts regulate the flight altitude. This type of balloon is sometimes called rosiers - in honor of one of the first balloonists, Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier, who died in 1785 when his balloon, filled with a mixture of hot air and hydrogen, caught fire in flight. The choice of fuel for heating the air in the shell is a determining factor in the flight performance of hot air balloons. After all, the greater the calorific value of a kilogram of fuel, the less fuel you need to take on a flight, the better the performance characteristics of a hot air balloon will be: it will be able to stay in the air longer, fly a greater distance or rise to a greater height. Our predecessors initially used everything that could burn to heat the air - tree branches, straw, coal, etc. Later they switched to oil, combustible gases, charcoal. The fuel was chosen that could quickly and efficiently heat the air in the hot air balloon, be cheap and affordable. As a result, we settled on a mixture of propane and butane in equal proportions. True, it is somewhat worse than pure propane, since it has less volatility and burners have to be equipped with additional devices to increase volatility. “Despite this,” Y.S. Boyko writes in his book, “the vast majority of modern hot air balloons run on propane-butane. It is widespread in everyday life, cheap, and the technology for its storage and transportation is well developed. It is easy to ignite and extinguish , a small amount of solid combustion products and non-toxicity. The burners have also changed beyond recognition. Now these are devices saturated with regulating and controlling mechanisms that automatically maintain the required temperature of hot air in the shell. Gas cylinders are usually made of aluminum alloys. Liquid propane in them is under a pressure of 10-20 atmospheres, and above the liquid propane is gaseous propane that enters the wick, which burns from the beginning of the flight to its end. The burning power of the wick is adjusted by the regulator. The purpose of the wick is to light the main burner during flight. After warming up to the required temperature of the air in the shell, the main burner is turned off in order to save gas. When the pilot notices on the variometer the beginning of the descent of the hot air balloon, which is caused by the cooling of the air in the shell, the main burner is turned on again, the air is heated and the hot air balloon rises. The burner power of modern hot air balloons is 1,8-4,6 MW. However, the air in the envelope can be heated, not only by burning any fuel on board the balloon. There is another source of heat - the sun. And if the shell is painted black, it will accumulate solar energy. According to this principle, in 1973 in the United States, the Solar Firefly hot air balloon was built, which flew using only the energy of sunlight. In France, a number of hot air balloons have been developed using infrared radiation from the sun. They got the name MIR. Their main difference is that the air in the shell is heated not only by atmospheric radiation of the infrared range, but also by the earth. The MIR shell is divided into two parts. The upper part emits practically no infrared radiation due to the special coating of the outer surface of the shell, for example, aluminized mylar, so heat accumulates under it. The lower part is made of transparent polyethylene film with a hole at the bottom. When such an aerostat flies over an area of the earth where the heat flow is directed upwards, the shell heats up and an additional aerostatic lifting force appears. During the day, the balloon rises, at night it descends, but not to the ground, but to a certain height, where the radiation of the earth is sufficient to maintain an elevated air temperature in the shell. Of course, the flight altitude of the balloon will depend on many factors: the latitude of the area and the seasons of the year, the clarity of the sky and the time of day, etc. In the stratosphere, the aerostatic lift from the heat of the sun and the earth is always positive, that is, the balloon can fly over the entire surface of the earth day and night. The flight altitude day and night allows you to change the air valve located in the upper part of the shell and controlled by a small engine powered by an onboard power source. When the valve is open, the warm air in the shell is replaced by cold air entering through the bottom hole, the diameter of which is larger than the diameter of the valve. Moreover, the volume of the shell remains constant. Multi-day flights in hot air balloons stimulated the competitive spirit of aeronauts. Many aeronautics enthusiasts dreamed of flying around the Earth. At first, attempts were made to fly over any ocean. The most suitable was the Atlantic, the northern part of which is dotted with numerous air and sea routes. This made it easier to monitor the flight and search for daredevils who ventured to fly the Atlantic. On September 14, 1984, 58-year-old American D. Kittinger, a former military test pilot, started from the city of Caribou in Maine, and, thanks to a strong tailwind, ended up off the coast of France in about 70 hours. The route of his flight ran over Newfoundland, then south of Greenland and before Ireland turned sharply to the southeast. This made it somewhat difficult to choose a landing site, since over Europe the aeronaut turned out to be much south of the places where the landing was planned. Flying along the northern spurs of the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean coast of France, he landed in a wooded area near the Italian city of Savona. The finish was difficult, the aeronaut was thrown out of the gondola from a height of three meters, he broke his leg and was immediately taken to the hospital. In 1998, Steve Fossett set the flight record. He went on a flight on New Year's Eve, hanging the entire gondola with propane cylinders to heat the air in the shell longer. However, in flight, trouble happened to him - the computer heating system of the cabin failed and he began to freeze. I had to descend into the warmer layers of the atmosphere. At an altitude of 914 meters, the balloonist crossed the Russian border in the Anapa region. After some time, he received a signal about an emergency descent - the equipment finally failed, and he was forced to land near the Grechanaya Balka farm in the Krasnodar Territory. The record holder in 1998 was an international crew consisting of the Swiss Bertrand Picard, the Belgian Bim Verstraeten and the Englishman Andy Elson. Starting from Europe into the skies without much fuss on the ball "Bratling Orbiter-2", they flew more than twenty thousand kilometers. But, having fallen into adverse weather conditions, they were forced to land in Burma. The excitement grew. In 1999, crews from different countries started one after another and most often failed. The main struggle broke out between the Europeans. The British Andy Elson and Colin Prescott, starting first from Spain on February 17, 1999, spent more than twelve days in the air, breaking the world record for flight duration and range, but still were forced to land - they ran out of fuel. Following the record holders, another balloon rushed, which started on March 1, on Sunday morning, from the Swiss town of Chateau d'Eu with the same goal - to make a non-stop flight around our planet. His commander was the grandson of the famous Swiss scientist and traveler Auguste Picard - Bertrand. He was prevented from launching on time, that is, on New Year's Eve, by two reasons: adverse weather and the lack of Beijing's permission to fly over Chinese airspace. Orbiter 3's compartments were not filled with helium, but with propane, so it turned out to be larger and heavier than Elson and Prescott's balloon. Its height was 55 meters, and it weighed 9 tons. But he was able to take large supplies of fuel, and this, in the end, paid off. “Picard and his partner, the British pilot Brian Jones, hoped to fly around the Earth in 16 days,” writes S. Nikolaev in the Tekhnika-Youth magazine, “having permission to fly over the southern part of China as an advantage. However, the expedition was far from being simple "We had to start with a strong ground wind, without waiting for good weather, because Picard was afraid to miss the favorable stratospheric currents. Immediately after the start they were carried to Spain. However, they managed to slightly straighten the direction of the flight, get over Mauritania into a favorable air current, which sent them to towards India, China and across the Pacific Ocean to California ... Several times the ball froze up and began to rapidly lose height. There were also malfunctions in the oxygen supply and ball control systems ... Only when the balloon "Orbiter-3" on the eighteenth day passed the American continent and ended up over the Atlantic, balloonists began to seriously hope for a successful outcome of their expedition. Hope gave them strength, which by that time was already running out. The aeronauts reported to the checkpoint that one of their heaters was out of order, and the temperature on board did not exceed eight degrees Celsius. Both have severe colds. Bertrand Piccard, a psychiatrist by profession, was even forced to resort to hypnosis in order to restore his strength.
On March 21, at about ten o'clock in the morning, incredibly tired aeronauts, having flown more than forty thousand kilometers, were able to leave their cramped cabin. "The eagle has landed," they radioed to Switzerland, landing near the village of Mut, which is 800 kilometers southwest of Cairo. So the record is set. What should modern aeronauts dream about now? About flying over both poles? Or arrange balloon races around the globe - who will travel around the world faster? It probably makes more sense to go the other way. NASA specialists have built a giant pumpkin-shaped balloon for astronomical research. Its diameter is about 128 meters and its height is 78. One of the attempts in the spring of 2001 ended in failure. The ball sank due to a leak, rising to a height of 20 kilometers. It is assumed that such a giant will float at an altitude of 35 kilometers with 1350 kilograms of scientific equipment and remain in the air for up to a hundred days. And during this time, in the presence of favorable winds, it will fly around our planet five times. In this case, all control will be carried out by radio and using the autopilot. It is envisaged to use solar panels to power on-board systems. Launching a balloon will cost at least three times less than launching a satellite, and the parachute-borne equipment can be used several times. Another original project was proposed by American design students Eric Reuter and David Goodwin: a 180-meter airship would float in the sky like a clipper ship. The lower part of its vertical structure will serve as a stabilizer keel, while the helium-filled pontoons - the central one and two side ones - will work as sails. The giant balloon can be used as a scientific base or a tourist aircraft. Author: Musskiy S.A.
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