Why don't we fill an Airship with a Vacuum? 

Bet I can make one.

Let me fix the title, it's "why don't we unfill an airship?"

Because making it strong enough to withstand 15 PSI of air pressure would make it WAY to heavy. You're welcome.

Rather than making the airship lighter, make the surrounding atmosphere heavier by pouring millions of tons of CO2 into it. Oh, wait...

CLEARLY the solution here is to fly a vacuum airship in space where it won't implode

That scrap metal went through a lot.

how can you _fill_ something with a vacuum to begin with? ;)

How to make physicists upset "Filling a box with vacuum" "Removing coldness to make it warm" "Electrons in a circuit travel at the speed of light" "The Imperial System"

me and a friend did the math on this decades ago, it wasn't just theoretically impossible it was sooo waaay beyond theoretical in order of magnitudes impossible that we didn't bother figuring it out for composites, but now i have something to do this weekend.

There was a time when people dreamed about vacuum airship fleets like the big naval fleets of the colonial empires. There is a book called "the world in 100 years" which was written in 1910. And it makes a lot of assumptions that sound ridiculous in retrospective, like for example that in 2010 the "German Colonial Empire" would have a massive vacuum air ship fleet that would wage war with a rebellious Chinese vacuum airship fleet.

How do you convert Tesla Model 3's to the much more common metric of Toyota Corolla?

Godamnit I wish hydrogen airships were safer. They look so cool.

People: "Why don't we make a vacuum airship?" ME: _Laughs at fourteen pounds per square inch._

I wonder if this couldn't be achieved with an aerogel. They're mostly air, yet insanely strong under compression, which is exactly what a material for this purpose must be. What if they were evacuated of air in a vacuum chamber, and an impermeable membrane was applied to the outer layer?

3:03 KSP Music? A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one

"An equally devastating implosion" Um. No. A far less devastating and completely fireless collapse under pressure.

I hope some day we’ll see Airships again. They were beautiful vehicles.

There could be a future for vacuum airships on Mars where the numbers add up.

I'm surprised Elon Musk still hasn't announced his HyperVac Pod that magically solves all these issues.

The bigger you make it, the more volume it has relative to area. That means more lift/displaced air relative to area under pressure. That means you could make the walls thicker and thicker as size increases. With a big enough blimp, it would work, although it wouldn't be practical and would have other issues.

I would like to add that helium is fully capable of being used for commercial airships. The USS Shenandoah, a rigid airship, flew on helium, and the Hindenburg itself was designed to fly with helium, but America was reluctant to give Hitler any.

Vacuum ships sound so much cooler than airships, really.

the KSP music is so fitting for talking about ludicrous engineering projects

My thought was always to use a scaled decrease. Like balloons inside balloons inside balloons, each with a slightly lower pressure than the surrounding layer. You'd probably never reach a true vacuum (or close enough by human standards), but it could provide additional buoyancy. Another thought I had was to create this structure with a foam substance that had bubbles created with helium or hydrogen. The foam in the middle would be created in a vaccuum, then surrounded by a layer created in very low pressure, again creating a gradient from core to skin.

I read the title and immediately thought"No way! It would immediately implode."

sees *fill* and *vacuum* me: okay

"Fill with vacuum" didnt think i would ever hear these words together

Partially it depends on scale. When something gets bigger the volume increases exponentially to it's surface area so if you were going to make a vaccumeship it would work better the more massive it was.

But wait... I understand that Graphene Aerogel can already be made 7% lighter than air... they're also machinable solids _(even though brittle, at least as a pure material)_ So, we could conceivably make airships safe and viable in the future - if material sciences continue to advance at the pace they have been. Imagine increasingly sparse materials, or novel cellular structures printed at the molecular level. The aerospace industry is certainly putting a lot of money into ever-lighter structural materials... and the space program is investing in ever more efficient and light insulators! I wonder if very small vacuums can be maintained inside of tiny cellular molecules... where their tiny surfaces can hold up, provided there are no free gases in the material. An outer skin would be necessary, but future 'fillers' could be interesting. As for protecting and containing such brittle materials from the elements, if necessary, we can already design materials which are far lighter than the skin of a historic airship - especially if there is no leaky hydrogen to contain ... aerogels tend not to be so difficult to constrain : ) Given advances in material technologies, I have a feeling that this video will age terribly : ) Peak oil will push us hard to innovate, even if that means taking a conceptual step backwards. Airships are not out of the question... but you can bet they'd be a lot safer and more efficient than previously.

Yeah, imagine if there was a sci-fi thing that is as strong or stronger than steel, but 98% lighter, yeah IMAGINE if such an unrealistic material would be found in the modern day... Carbon fiber: Am i a joke to you?

KSP music for the win

How about "pockets" of vacuum embedded within an aerogel? Strong, lightweight, fireproof.

I don't see why there is such an explosion worry about Hydrogen. Jet fuel is pretty explosive, and when slammed into the ground from 3 miles up at 600mph NOBODY walks away. With modern materials, handling processes and sensors I don't see why nobody is building Rigid Airships for the 21st century. I bet you could cover them with solar panels and make them pretty Carbon Neutral too.

Here's an idea: Make an airship with a rigid inner compartment filled with hydrogen, surrounded by an outer protective compartment filled with helium. Any crash will impact the outer helium compartment first, causing no fire, and the inner compartment will still remain intact. That way you get buoyancy that is better than a helium dirigible, possibly enabling it to be built as a rigid airship, allowing for better crash protection and better aerodynamics.

Americans: "Metric system is dumb" Also Americans: 3:37

I was totally wondering why wouldn't a vacuum ship work when I saw a photography exhibition on airships a few weeks ago. Thanks for answering this question!!

Graphene of a certain strength -diamond hard-light enough and Would You like to fly in my Beautiful Balloon -The 5th Dimension

That was mentioned in Larry Niven's science-fiction books, where a stasis field was formed in space and then towed down to Earth. The stasis field's battery burned out after a second, but because time was slowed in stasis, this gave the balloon an operational life of 50 years.

"8 and 40 souls came to die in France." -Bruce Dickinson

The Hindenburg was originally designed to hold helium.

Helium is Fully capable of lifting commercial airships, especially the newer lighter designs. the thing is, we're running out of Helium... seriously, it will be commercially unavailable by 2050 and virtually gone by 2075... and those numbers are optimistic, it will likely be too expensive for most uses within the next 2 decades.

"Why don't we fill an Airship with a Vacuum?" Because *vacuum* isn't a thing; it is a not-thing. Not-things occupy no space, therefore you could fill the airship for all eternity and still not *fill* it up.

First, remember all things come to an end. I'm thinking I'll stop giving certificates to people who comment 'first', it was fun but time to drop the joke. There are a couple of reasons, the last few times have been the same person, so obviously, the competition aspect is limited. Perhaps it could return if the channel grows more, however, this will also allow me to offer early access to videos as a $1 patron perk. Patrons are the lifeblood of the channel and literally pay for the software I use to make these animations, I want to reward them more, because they are awsome.

A vacuum airship might work in the upper atmosphere where the gas pressure is much lower. Just rocket the craft into orbit, expand and seal the balloons, then lower it into the atmosphere slowly enough that it doesn't burn up. I wonder what kind of application that could have that's different from a conventional satellite.

The reason why this is an impossible dream is the weight of air. 1L of water weighs 1Kg and occupies a volume of 1000 cubic cm. 1 ton of water is 1 cubic meter. That's a lot of weight that can fit in basically a two person hot tub. And everything you place in the water is displacing a volume of it. That volume of displaced water is pushing back against you and makes you float. If you drop 1 cubic meter of steel in water - it will sink. But if that cubic meter is just made of steel walls and filled with air - then you have almost 1 ton of force pushing it back above the water. And that's how we use the weight of water to float all our ships on it. The bigger the displacement - the stronger the force that pushes back. But now let's see how strong air can push back. 1 liter of air weighs 1.3 grams...... That's almost 800 times less than water. To make air float objects with the same force, that steel cube would have to be the size of a huge building and weigh exactly the same as before, while containing pure vacuum within its walls. It's just impossible to make. And even if we develop such strong lightweight material, you would be looking at a monstrous 80 cubic meter floater just to barely take one man up in the sky. And the higher you go - the worst that balance gets. It would be terribly impractical no matter how technologically advanced we are. Air is not heavy or dense enough. And we like it that way.

I'm not the only one who read the title and instantly lost iq points

... wait... so people do not immediately conclude that it is the outside pressure crushing it that would be the issue? This is without even taking into account the machinery that would be required to maintain the vacuum state and the weight that equipment would also require.

*SOLUTION: Perfect the structural integrity of the fuselage with **_"Graphene"._** Avoid all other metals.* _Next challenge._

I've seen one airship (modern) where the helium is contained in cells distributed across the body of the craft so that the body is not the container. Would it be possible, with the necessary composite materials, to achieve the level of buoyancy necessary using this vacuum theory? I know these cells would necessarily need to be strong and this might increase the weight of the container, but do you know of any trials that used this approach?

Glaring omission --> the atmosphere thins rapidly with altitude and vacuum. So just increase internal vacuum with altitude. Use a gauge to continuously measure air pressure differences inside and outside the derigible and a vacuum pump to change internal pressure to within safe limits of the structure.... Simple solution, isn't it? I have been advocating for vacuum airships for a long time. Perhaps we should call it a variable vacuum derigible. Allowing some ambient air back in could then reduce altitude. Easy peasy and very safe.

I literally just thought this question yesterday... GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!

That depends on what kind of vacuum... Hoover? Electrolux? Dyson? Roomba? Bissell?

"why don't we [fly] an airship with a vacuum?' there, that makes more sense

Is this a trick question? What could you possibly make it out of that would keep it from becoming heavier than air without collapsing on itself?

How big (t/D) would an evacuated diamond sphere have to be to float in the atmosphere of a low gravity moon like Titan?

You dont need to, you can have an airship with consecutively lower and lower pressure pockets the closer you come to the core of the airship, and the relative pressure difference would be spread out and thus materials don't need to be as strong to resist all the sum strain.

What about heated helium? So combine the elements of a hot air balloon with a helium derigible.

This was pretty interesting. I was thinking about a similar concept using vacuum, or helium inside of wind power generator blades, in order to make them more efficient, by using more blades. Here's another idea, why not heat up the helium, or other gas, similar to a hot air balloon? You could use combustion, electric heaters, a transparent dirigible that is heated with sunlight, even hydrogen as a fuel. It may not work well in cold weather though, depending on how it's designed. But it seems like the solution to making helium work is just heat.

They're actually considering vacuum airships for use on mars...

The outside air pressure, without any counteracting force, would be 15 psi. I estimate a billion square inches. No material in existence is strong and light enough to keep such a container from implosion.

of course a British airship scheme was thwarted by the weather in France

"Fill it by emptying it!" Just because someone recieved an education, doesn't mean they are educated.

And I thought there was, “…no such thing as stupid questions.”

Simple solution: make the vacuum cells from an alloy of unobtainium and handwavium...🤣

Maybe carbon nanotubes will make this possible some day. 🤔

Maybe it’s time to revisit hydrogen, surely we have the ability to make it much safer than in the past considering we now have cars powered by hydrogen that seem to store it very safely. I think that could be achieved more easily than a vacuum airship.

Have there been any attempts at creating a lightweight vacuum chamber that could float, just to see if it's physically possible? The aerospace industry has been working on all kinds of lightweight composite materials.

My mind goes to that time the Mythbusters pulled a vacuum in an oil car.

The shorter answer is that the gas inside the airship actually acts as part of its structure.

Filling with vacuum? Looks like clickbait to me!

"Homo genius" is the best pronunciation of homogeneous I've ever heard.

Aren't we running out of helium

Should it be high-pressure or low-pressure vacuum? For the envelope I recommend anti-matter only!

What are the principles known as that can help such devices like Zeppelin in flying?

Helium doesn't provide enough lift? I don't think this is right. The US Navy had rigid body Helium airships until the 1930s, the Akron class, that were capable of carrying planes hooked on (pretty cool). It's said that Helium being hard to obtain is one reason they didn't build more. I couldn't say if that is really the reason or not.

Why don't we fill airships with vacuums?Same reason light bulbs hang from ceilings and don't float up from the floor.

4:20 "no homogeneous material can even theoretically achieve both" So obviously you don't use a homogeneous material. You have struts placed strategically in the interior, wherever they need to be in order to provide the maximum possible strength using the minimum possible weight. These struts are not solid, but are themselves composed of smaller struts, except maybe in a few small locations where the pressure on them is so great that nothing but a solid will suffice. The smaller struts will be for the most part composed of still smaller struts, and so on until you are almost at an atomic level. 3-D printers would be used at most scales, to maximise the control we have over the structure. At the very smallest scale, Some of the struts will be solid while others will consist of an aerogel. some of the spaces between struts (those that need it the most) would be filled with a less dense aerogel. Think of an interior that's like the exterior of a Gothic cathedral except the flying buttresses have smaller flying buttresses to support them, which in turn have smaller flying buttresses, and so on. The construction material at the very smallest scales would resemble the bones of birds, but with added aerogel at strategic locations in order to improve on nature. All of this is constructed with materials with the highest strength/weight ratios that we know of, and every element is located exactly where it needs to be, according to our very best A.I. Similarly the exterior is a fractal and not a simple sphere. It consists of domed facets which in turn are covered with smaller domes, and so on. At the very smallest scale, the domes are small enough for their curvature to provide enough structural strength to overcome both the external air pressure and any other forces that might be expected to impinge on the craft in day-to-day use.

You do not need a Thick outer shell. But a Magnetic one. A Strong Magnetic field in the Center Pushes the Thin Shell away. Its like a Huge Atom.

This is what I think...humongous torus (filled with aerogel under a vacuum) with a sphere(cargo and passenger area) in the center of the torus. Between the sphere and torus two counter rotating rotors. At the core of the torus, insulated by aerogel under vacuum, there would be a superconducting loop of energy that get a bump from super capacitors also made from the aerogel. Capacitors charged by solar collecting skin of torus. Rotors controlled by magnetic force of superconductor. I see shunts through torus with ports on surface utilizing air forced through shunts from rotors for control. I think this could go up very high and stay up. And I think it would want to stay up.

LOL! Edgar Rice Burroughs had a vacuum dirigible in his Pellucidar stories. If memory serves, he alluded somewhat vaguely to a special strong and light mystery metal of which the vacuum spheres were constructed.

We can make a ship fly by filling it with vacuum... In that case we have prepare the ship with a hard material, and generally the ship will be very big, containing a huge hollow chamber with vacuum pumps, such that it's avarage density will be less than that of displaced air....

Would it be possible to mix both hydrogen and helium gases together ? In a ratio that would allow for some extra lift while not being as flammable as straight hydrogen ? Or to have different gas bags with different gases ? My apologies for my ignorance of the science behind my questions , am asking as I have always wanted to make an airship but always thought that both gases had approximately the same amount of lift .

I've got a question here actually. The second half of these theoretics depends on the vaccuum using up the entire hull, and then just having a gondola stuck to the bottom. But say if you were to have a seperate cannister (or several) inside the hull, similar to the gasbags of the hydrogen zeppelins, except also with a fully rigid container. That way the risk of being crushed of pressure would be reduced significantly, and in addition, large amounts of space inside hull would be still usable, without the need of an extremely heavy hull, or a larger gondola.

If 3D printed carbon nano tubes can be constructed in a sphere with a sponge like lattice structure on the interior that might be the strong enough to make a vacuum air ship

Short answer: We won't have light enough materials of sufficient strength and stiffness untill we get structures of carbon nanotubes and/or graphene. This would be great since a long skinny zepplin could rely on being lighter than air for lift allowing the use of a circular ring like wing that won't provide lift but could be tailored to cancel out a sonic boom if the vehicle is propelled beyond the speed of sound. I doubt they'll ever figure out that whole docking with a skyscraper thing imagined for the Hindenburg but supersonic flights over land and potentially between any and all airfields would be quite a thing.

You simply fill it with steam which is 1600 times as voluminous as water then you just have to keep it hot with a flame, you're welcome. 😆

Think Submarines and why they have a maximum dive or "crush depth".

A vacuum is the absence of air or gas, so you cannot FILL something with a vacuum. You evacuate the vessel. Poor english.

That you would actually get views on this goes to show how ignorant many people are. Congratulations on tapping this large potential market. /not

Are you sure the math is right? Because, from what I know, for helium, the price is much higher, but it uses the same volume of space. Also, while conventional airships (which are a sub-category of aerostats) use hot air which has 30% of the lifting force of hydrogen and/or helium, and some use water-saturated hot air which has 40% of the lifting force of hydrogen and/or helium, steam has 60% of the lifting force of hydrogen or helium. That means that if you can make a flexible-membrane airship which can survive 150 C (or 300 F) degrees, or even a rigid airship with some hydraulic bellows for dealing with the difference in volume, then airships are very much possible. In fact, you could even have multiple tethered/springed airships to generate the lift, and simply decompress some when they are not needed, or have telescopic parts in the front and the back, to increase the volume where the steam is stored, to make the landing and takeoff easier. And the best part is that if there are leaks, you're just leaking steam or even liquid water, instead of combustible or flammable substances. And, if you use said telescopic design, with air-locks to reduce the steam loss from some impacts, then even if you have leaks, you can still close off that section and continue, or even just slowly descend. And you could even have machinery for people to be able to use some materials to cover the holes, then have climbing tethers be used from the outside to patch or repair the punctured area. In fact, the only downside of that patch-work would be lower thermal sealing, causing the ship to need to use more fuel to keep the steam hot enough to float the airship to the nearest safe hangar usable for repair, to nearest blimp drop-off point where to get the passengers onto a different airship, or even to hop from fuel station to fuel station (aka. gas stations in USA or petrol stations in EU) to get more fuel to reheat the steam, to complete the ride safely. And the buoyancy substance is water, which is (pardon the pun) dirt cheap. And it would still need to have turbofan or turboprop engines for navigation and course-correction anyway, especially to move at speeds of 50 km/h to 100 km/h (in a straight line) so even in the case of fairly significant leaks, you would till have enough power to coast the aircraft to the destination, or to the nearest usable refueling station, from where to take off again and continue to the destination, even if you have to use a smaller airship to get ahead of the main ship to buy fuel, then get back to the main ship with that fuel, like with the inflatoplane (inflatable airplane) used in the second world war and which some people are trying to bring back as an ultralight portable airplane which could fit in the trunk of a sedan (which are notorious for small trunks) or even be carried by a scooter/moped. Heck, with some ingenuity, there could be made an inflatoplane-moped hybrid, which to turn into an airplane after a few minutes of unpacking. It would only need a propeller in the front (2 blades work for being low lateral profile while packed, but 4 blades could work just as well, by having them work both parallel to the initial 2 blades, or perpendicular to the initial two blades), an air compressor (connected to the airplane engine, so you don't need to worry about the leaks, if you still maintain structural integrity), and systems for turning the airplane in all 3 axis of rotation (yaw like a pirouette, pitch the nose/tip up and down, and roll like a barrel on it's side), which could also be aided by tilting the whole propeller by a few degrees, or it could even have a telescopic channel wing for take-off and landing at slower speeds than normally available and in much smaller places than normally available.

*Dirigible fatally crashes and burns "Let's do it again, using the same parts, but bigger."

The people in these comments annoy me. The definition of fill is to put something in something. A vacuum is "something". (Even if it is nothing)

How do you fill something with nothing, that’s just grammatically and scientifically irresponsible

What about creating a half-vacuum by pushing air out via ducted fans? The fans would create lift by pushing the air down, and the semi-vacuum would create additional lift. Furthermore the half vacuum chamber should allow air in such a way it enter through the hemisphere and upwards, so the air coming in also creates lift.

You can't fill with vacuum. It is taking out what ever is inside that creates a vacuum.

Besides the fact that the thing would implode, you have to have something lighter than the surrounding air inside to generate lift. Even if this vacuum principle were sound no known material as you say has both the strength and lightness to do the job. I would like see someone do this on a small scale to show proof of concept though, maybe with something the size of a football

Carbon fiber, reinforced with interwoven steel threads, sandwitching a mylar film? With a rigid nylon inner frame? Not to forget modern alloys of aluminum that are much easier/cheaper to produce. So possibly instead of an inner frame, an outer frame tethered like a 600-cell (4th dimensional icosahedron) to the inner "gasbag" in many places🤔📝

Could you go with a hybrid approach? Fill the airship with a helium at 2 atmos pressure?

Graphene could be used once the figure out how to produce it cost effectively.

Why not use high pressure helium tubes as a sort or rigid inner support for vacuum airships