Post date: Mar 14, 2011 2:34:2 AM
The SolarBlimp Design Team has gotten off to a good start in our attempt to build a Solar Powered Airship. A few highlights of the team's recent activities:
The Blimp Building Contest
The team held its first outreach event - a build your own blimp competition. After a few false starts, some really interesting submissions were made. Congratulations go out to Shawn Yin for his winning submission, a simple spheroid blimp that ferried a cup of pennies around the competition hall.
Please see here for photos of some of the submissions.
Strength Testing/Gas Bag Testing
The team is moving forward with the design of the airship. Over the next few weeks we will be working on testing the strength of our chosen envelop material - heptax. As well, we aim to do some simple experiments quantifying the gas leakage of model airship envelopes.Â
Nuit Blanche Application
The team has decided to move beyond just the traditional engineering design challenges. After meeting some architecture students from the University of Waterloo, the team has submitted an entry into this year's Nuit Blanche Competition. The competition aims to find worthy projects for the Nuit Blanche art festival that happens every October in Toronto. The team aims to provide the technical muscle to build the submission, while the architecture students have helped refine the original concept and produced the images that went into the competition submission. We expect to hear back from the Nuit Blanche Selection Committee by the end of March.
Please see here for an excerpt of our submission.