Comment by DoctorOetker
10 months ago
Is there a reason weather balloons can't be designed to stay aloft for much longer? is it really impossible to miniaturize gas separators in weight to replenish the lighter fraction of molecules to compensate for the slow leakage?
In reading the documents google's Loon made available before shutting down (and saying that hydrogen airships were the way to go) [https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/The%...], the bottleneck on staying up longer was helium loss. Lots of things, mechanical failure etc, caused flights to end early. But the ultimate limit seems to be either helium loss or the impact of helium absorption on seals etc causing failure. Helium is a very small molecule, so very hard to keep confined.
However, as they learned from experience, Loon was slowly increasing their upper limit on how long their balloons could stay up.
Sure there will be leakage.
Let's look at the composition vs height:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#/media/Fil...
I understand helium will be sparse at low heights, but at each height there is a diversity of species, among which will be a lighter one. Could a balloon be oversized so that instead of using helium, at each height an 80% fill of the locally (that height) lightest gas could keep the balloon afloat. Oversized for this but also for the added weight for separating equipment for the wanted gas and associated panels to power it.
I.e. what prevents a balloon from flying indefinitely? At least up until radiation damage of the balloon membrane...
Have such attempts been made and what were the lessons?
These guys [https://www.scientificballoonsolutions.com/news/], as of October 2018, claim the world record. [edit: the site linked says Alan Adamson but an upstream post mentions Lee Meadows. That thread also credits Bill Brown as a pioneer - https://www.stratoballooning.org/membership#!biz/id/5f4d7b97...]
The world record balloon was launched on September 21, 2016, stayed up over 767 days, circled the world 35 times and traveled over 1.5 million kilometers.
Their website, still from 2018, indicates they are working on even better designs.
One of the first ideas we explored was putting an electrolyzer on the balloon to replenish hydrogen over time. Unfortunately right now, for balloons our size and power budget it's just not feasible. And actually, we can get a pretty low leakage rate with our materials which lets us stay aloft for a really long time, but eventually the UV degradation becomes to extreme.