Aerographite, is lighter than air. Yes, lighter than air. Recently discovered by German scientists in 2012, aerographite is 75x lighter than Styrofoam but the same strength. It is made up of a mesh of interwoven, linked chain of carbon tubes which are 15nm in diameter. 1kg of the material takes up around five cubic meters of space. Think about this, it is insane. I can envisage airships that don’t use hydrogen or helium but use a “solid” tank of aerographite, meaning there would be no risk of explosions from the flammable hydrogen and lower risk of bursting the blimp. Also, you would not need to refill the blimp with hydrogen/helium leading to greater long term efficiency and potential applications that don’t require landing (e.g. surface imaging).

You might ask yourself, how are you going to come back down to earth if you cannot release some of the hydrogen/helium? One could use a high capacity water condenser to condense water vapour into tanks to use as a ballast and/or use engines to guide the airship down.

Typically, a standard Goodyear blimp will has around 200,000 cubic feet of helium creating around 12,500 pounds of lift. Helium is around 7x lighter than air. Aerographite is also around around 6x lighter than air. So we can say that the size of this aerographiteship would be slightly bigger than a normal airship.

The material also has an interesting property: after 95% compression of the material, it is possible for the material to return back to its original shape. This means the blimps could be packed into a deployable unit 20x times smaller for later expansion.

Another application could be high altitude wind turbines that hold their position high up without having to refill expensive helium tanks. An advantage of being high altitude would be the wind speed is fast and constant. Altaeros energies Inc should also think about this material for future builds.

Normally it takes around 20 years to get materials into mass production (see history of carbon fibre). The main question remains, when will we have aerographite in mass production?

One other limitation will be creating aerographites that can support themselves with the air inside the material “pumped” out of it (to truly achieve being lighter than air). In practice, getting a real blimp to work will probably be made out of a future version of aerographite or another aerogel that is super strong and light, one that could self support itself without collapsing in on itself if the air between the meshes of nanotubes is pumped out. A partial vacuum will have to be created inside the aerographite structure without crushing the aerogel. This may be the fatal flaw to the idea or at least the next problem to solve (i.e. given that the material is superhydrophobic, maybe a thin shell of water could be put around the aerogel or some similar exotic solution).

Credit to Millennium Airship Inc for the image.

via Jude Gomila