A novel design technique, where an airship featuring ion-plasma thrusters is sized for a low-altitude demonstration mission has been published on ICAS 2024 โ34th Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences conferenceโ proceedings. The research is conducted by the of the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology, Politecnico di Milano composed by Marco Belan, Carlo E.D. Riboldi, Stefano Cacciola, Raffaello Terenzi, Stefano Trovato, Davide Usuelli and Giuseppe Familiari.
The adoption of ion-plasma thrusters on airships, represents the scope of the IPROP research project, promising to offer a stark reduction in the complexity of stratospheric surveillance platforms, thus reducing the rate of failures, increasing the time between overhauls (TBO), and in turns extending the mission time.
A first practical demonstration of this propulsive technology, which has been applied in aeronautics only sporadically, is a planned milestone in this research project, together with the setup of suitable design and sizing procedures for airships coping with the specificity of this propulsion technique. Besides introducing these algorithms from a conceptual standpoint, the article reports sizing results and considerations obtained from the application of these procedures to a specific demonstration mission, yielding the preliminary design and sizing data of a flying demonstrator running on ion-plasma thrusters.
At this link the full-length conference paper: https://www.icas.org/icas_archive/icas2024/data/papers/icas2024_0649_paper.pdf
ICAS 2024 took place last September 2024 in Florence and it gathered around 1000 Scientists from over 41 countries, including delegates of world leading aerospace industrial companies and major research institutes,
For more information on the full project research visit the website: www.iprop-project.eu/research/