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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
Airship. History of invention and production
Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us An airship (from French dirigeable - controlled) is an aircraft lighter than air, which is a combination of a balloon with a screw electric motor, or with an internal combustion engine and an attitude control system (rudders), thanks to which the airship can move in any direction, regardless of the direction of air streams.
Just over 150 years have passed from the beginning of the history of aircraft lighter than air - balloons and airships - to its seemingly complete completion. In 1783, the Montgolfier brothers lifted a free balloon into the air, and in 1937, on the mooring mast in Lakehurst (USA), the airship LZ-129 Gindenburg, built in Germany, burned down, on board of which there were 97 people. Thirty-five of them died, and the catastrophe so shocked the world community that it persuaded the great powers to stop building large airships. Thus passed a whole era in aeronautics, the last 40 years of which fell on the development of rigid airships called zeppelins (after one of the main developers, the German general Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin). If the animal world developed from the external skeleton (as in spiders and crustaceans) to the internal, then the evolution of flying machines lighter than air went in the opposite direction. The Montgolfier brothers' balloon was out of control. But when creating aircraft, the inventors just wanted to move in the chosen direction. And a year later, a military engineer and scientist, famous mathematician and inventor Jacques Meunier presented his project to the Paris Academy, which he called the word "controlled" - "airship". He suggested making the apparatus not spherical, but elongated, like a spindle. And to maintain shape and elasticity in flight, insert something like a rubberized bag (ballonet) into the outer shell. Since hydrogen leaked through the airship envelope, the air pumped into the balloonet had to make up for the leak and, in addition, regulate the flight altitude.
Only in 1852, the French designer Henri Giffard created the first controlled balloon with a steam engine. At the same time, he attached the balloon of the apparatus to a strong longitudinal rod, which gave the structure additional rigidity. After all, otherwise its elongated shell could bend and even fold in half, and this made flight impossible.
A special topic is the material for shells. Since for a long time hydrogen was used to fill aircraft, the shell had to be not only strong, light and resistant to sunlight, but also gas-tight. At the same time, the improvement of some qualities could lead to the deterioration of others. For example, the better the gas impermeability was, the heavier the fabric. Nevertheless, these fabrics passed up to ten liters of gas per square meter per day and quickly grew old. By the end of the 20s, the well-known American company Goodyear created a light balloon fabric coated with gelatin, and the Germans began developing polymer films. Meanwhile, engineers were trying to solve the problem of airship rigidity. The next step was the development of the Italian designer and polar explorer Umberto Nobile (from 1938 to 1946 - head of the Soviet design bureau "Airshipablestroy", head of the creation of the largest Soviet airship "USSR-B6 Osoaviakhim"). He placed a rigid truss inside the apparatus. The "spine", although it improved the characteristics of airships, did not solve the problems of real structural rigidity. Needed a "shell". The idea to make the hull metal came to the Austrian designer David Schwartz after his predecessor Hermann Welfert's traditionally filled with hydrogen and equipped with a gasoline engine exploded in the air. In the same 1897, a controlled Schwartz balloon took off in Berlin, the body of which was already made of riveted aluminum, but engine problems forced an emergency landing, during which the device fell into disrepair and was no longer restored. Having become acquainted with the works of Schwartz, the retired General Count von Zeppelin saw their promise, but also realized that the previously used thin-walled rigid shell was not a panacea: bending loads acting in flight would inevitably create forces that cause wrinkling and destroy the strongest material. He came up with a framework of lightweight box trusses riveted from aluminum strips with holes stamped into them. The frame was made of ring-shaped truss frames, interconnected by the same stringers. Between each pair of frames there was a chamber with hydrogen (a total of 1217 pieces), so that if two or three internal cylinders were damaged, the rest would maintain volatility, and the device would not be damaged. Having carried out strength calculations and tests of structural elements together with his assistant engineer Theodor Kober, Zeppelin was convinced that the task was feasible. However, at the suggestion of local scientists who did not believe in the ideas of the count, the newspapers at first called him "a mad aristocrat." Nevertheless, two years after the accident of the Schwartz balloon, Zeppelin, having invested all his savings, began to build an apparatus, called without false modesty Luftschiffbau Zeppelin ("Zeppelin Airship" - LZ-1). And in the summer of 1900, a cigar-shaped eight-ton giant 128 m long, 12 m in diameter, and 11,3 thousand m3 in volume, having made a successful 18-minute flight, turned General von Zeppelin, who was reputed to be almost an urban madman, into a national hero.
The country, which recently lost the war with France, took the general's idea of a miracle weapon with a bang. Zeppelin fans collected more than six million Reichsmarks, which became the authorized capital of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH joint-stock company. And for the First World War, Zeppelin built several machines with a length of 148 m, reaching speeds of up to 80 km / h, which, with the outbreak of hostilities, immediately went to bomb England, which considered itself impregnable under the protection of the English Channel. These air leviathans, soaring at a huge height for that time, were not afraid of the then aircraft and artillery, and their ideal suitability for aerial reconnaissance atoned for the shortcomings in the accuracy of bombing. And even when the urgently mobilized resources of the British gave them the opportunity to create effective anti-aircraft artillery and aircraft capable of storming the heights, the zeppelins became transporters to deliver reinforcements, weapons and military equipment to the garrisons of German colonies in Africa. In 1917, the LZ-104 was built at the Zeppelin shipyard, developing a cruising speed of 80 km / h, capable of carrying five tons of bomb load at a distance of up to 16 thousand km. In other words, he could reach the shores of America. This zeppelin did not have time to take part in the battles, and after the defeat of Germany, it was blown up by its crew. In total, from 1900 to 1916, 176 airships were built in Germany. The First World War put production on stream, and 123 cars were released from the stocks into the sky.
Ferdinand von Zeppelin did not live to see the end of the war, after which the losing Germany began to pay for reparations with his offspring. Under the Treaty of Versailles, she was forbidden to produce many things, including airships that could be used both for peaceful and military purposes. And yet the creations of the count-inventor reached the United States. The successor of his work, Hugo Eckener, wanted to keep the company and offered the Americans to receive a new giant airship capable of conquering the Atlantic free of charge as reparations. Eckener managed to persuade the German government to finance the work, and in 1924 the LZ-126 flying on inert (and therefore non-combustible) helium was built. Unlike Europe, the States produced this safe-to-fly gas in abundance. The Zeppelin was commissioned into the US Navy and named Los Angeles.
America, which after its civil war has always fought only in foreign territories, needed powerful vehicles to transport troops and equipment, as well as for long-range maritime reconnaissance. Then, in the 20s, a plan arose in the United States to build a powerful aeronautical fleet of 1012 rigid-type airships. They were intended to patrol the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. At the same time, it was assumed that each of them would carry on board from five to twelve reconnaissance aircraft or dive bombers and would be able to cross the ocean twice without refueling. Due to the outbreak of the economic crisis, the specially created company Goodyear-Zeppelin was not able to immediately start mass production, but in 1931 the first airship of the ZRS-4 series called Akron (length - 239 m, diameter - 40,5 m, volume - 184 thousand cubic meters). m3, maximum speed - 130 km / h, maximum flight range - 17,5 thousand km) took to the air.
It should be noted that the early European zeppelins filled with hydrogen were very uneconomical: as they consumed fuel (up to 20% of the weight) and reached a great height, it was necessary, in order to avoid rupture of the gas chambers, first to release air from the balloonnets, and then through special valves to bleed tens of thousands cubic meters of hydrogen, which is quite expensive to produce. Helium is 30-40 times more expensive than hydrogen, and releasing it into the atmosphere would be tantamount to burning cars with banknotes. As early as 1928, German engineers used a clever solution in the design of the huge Graf Zeppelin airship, which made it possible not to lose hydrogen in flight. The Germans installed on it engines capable of running on the so-called "blue gas" (blaugaz, or carbureted water gas enriched with high-calorie gas, obtained in gas generators or during oil cracking; used as a municipal fuel). Its density is very close to the density of air, and in terms of calories, one cubic meter replaced 1,5 kg of gasoline. "Pigeon gas" could also solve the problems of the Americans, but it was not produced in the USA, and local designers placed a plant on board the Akron to extract water from the exhaust gases of gasoline engines. In a special radiator, the gases were cooled, and the water was condensed and sent to the ballast tanks, and the weight of the airship did not change in flight. Akron carried five reconnaissance aircraft, each of which weighed more than a ton, in floor-hatched hangars. To take off, the aircraft with the engine running was lowered with the help of a truss rod through the hatch and began an independent flight. For landing, the rod, at the end of which there was a loop in the shape of a trapezoid, was extended outward, and the plane, equalizing the speed with the speed of the airship, flew up to the trapezoid, clung to it with a special hook, and was pulled into the hangar. Fighters and dive bombers were also created, capable of operating from an aircraft carrier. After flying off for two years, Akron died in a severe storm. In the same 1933, the Americans lifted into the air a zeppelin of the same series - Maсon, which also died two years later, falling into a downdraft. And the construction of rigid airships in the United States ceased. As already mentioned, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Zeppelin, the giant LZ-127 (236,6 m long and 30,5 m in diameter), christened Graf Zeppelin, descended from the stocks of his company. He made 2700 flights, including the first round-the-world flight. It, like other German airships, used hydrogen. But it was not air that was pumped into special chambers with a volume of 30 thousand m3, but blaugaz, which was used as fuel. As it was consumed, the weight of the airship remained almost unchanged and it was not necessary to bleed hydrogen.
The last flight of the Graf Zeppelin was in 1936, and in 1940 it was destroyed by order of the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering: in the new war, he relied on aircraft. Thus ended the history of the German zeppelins. By and large, the airships of the rigid system anticipated other types of airships and emerging aircraft in terms of carrying capacity, speed and range. However, by the time of the death of the aircraft carrier Macon, the aircraft had already flown over the Atlantic Ocean, and the "flying temple of socialism", the Maxim Gorky aircraft, was capable of carrying 17 tons of payload - three times more than any airship. Zeppelins in the form in which they were conceived have become obsolete. Today, controlled aeronautics is being revived for other purposes and based on other technologies. Author: S.Apresov
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