An Improved Climbing Strategy for High-Altitude Fast-Deploy Aerostat Systems

Due to the restrictions associated with the actual deployment time, the flight performance of traditional aerostat systems in the climbing process needs to be improved to reduce the climbing time and the horizontal movement. This paper presents a scheme comprising a dual-balloon system, including an assisting system and a station-keeping system. In this study, a thermal and dynamic model for an aerostat system in the climbing course was established. To verify the theoretical model, flight experiments including traditional and improved aerostat systems were conducted. The performance of the improved aerostat system was compared with that of the traditional aerostat system. In addition, in this paper, the effects of helium mass in the tow balloon and payload mass on the climbing performance and equilibrium height of the improved aerostat system are discussed in detail. The results demonstrate that larger tow balloon volume does not guarantee better performance. With a fixed payload mass, equilibrium height initially rises sharply with helium mass but soon plateaus. Compared to traditional zero-pressure balloons, the dual-balloon system cuts ascent time by two-thirds. The proposed conceptual design and theoretical model could be a pathway towards achieving rapid deployment in high-altitude dual-balloon systems.