Airship Sizing for Flying Qualities: An Automated Methodology and Applications

Among the most versatile lighter-than-air platforms, unmanned airships are currently being designed mostly for either low-altitude missions for close-distance surveillance, in competition with multicopter drones, or for high-altitude missions in the stratospheric layer, thus ideally complementing the role of space satellites. Correspondingly, algorithms to automatically compute global values such as the volume and mass of an airship for a desired mission performance and for assumed technologies of the components (such as the materials employed for the envelope or solar cells) have been experimented with and are documented in the literature. Building on this base, this research proposes a method where not just the parameters most typical of preliminary design are solved, but a unified automatic approach is employed to take into account requirements on static balance as well as dynamic performance in the form of characteristic time and damping of some of the eigenmodes. In this way, the outcome of the automatic sizing procedure may account not just for the requirements of the mission profile, but also potentially for static balance and for a desired level of flying qualities.