A novel design technique for airships featuring ion-thrusters has been presented at the 34th Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences conference #ICAS2024, by IPROP project team at PoliMi-DAER. Prof. Carlo E.D. Riboldi, prof. Stefano Cacciola and Dr. Raffaello Terenzi took part to the congress, this year hosted by #AIDAA.
The proposed presentation covered a preliminary design technique, where an airship featuring ion-plasma thrusters is sized for a low-altitude demonstration mission. The technique allows to obtain a weight-optimal design point, guaranteeing minimum weight whilst simultaneously complying with flight performance and technological constraints, including the integrity of the envelope and the limitations of nowadays batteries.
The methodology has been tested on a practical case of interest for the project, and the corresponding design solution has been compared to one covering the same mission but pushed by standard electro-mechanical motors. The results obtained with ion-thrusters up to know appear promising, showing the feasibility of the proposed design already at the current level of technology.
A full-length conference paper will be soon available in the proceedings of the conference.
ICAS 2024 took place in Florence, Italy and it gathered 1000 Scientists from over 41 countries, including delegates of world leading aerospace industrial companies and major research institutes, from 9th to 13th September.
