A Methodology for Conceptual Design and Optimization of a High Altitude Airship

Abstract

This paper describes the methodology for conceptual design of a high altitude airship (HAA), which has to be posed in an optimization framework. The paper starts with the review of projects, studies, programs related to design and development of stratospheric airship carried word-wide and highlights the global developement in this field. Critical issues affecting the stratospheric airship design are discussed in brief. The details of methodology for initial sizing of solar powered stratospheric airship is presented and the need of coupling this methodology with the other optimization methodologies are discussed. Given the basic operating and performance parameters, the methodology sizes the airship, and arrives at the mass breakdown of system. The final developed methodology would be coupled with the optimization algorithm to obtain an optimal solution for some user-defined objective function.