I just recently completed my industrial design undergraduate thesis, and the design that I decided to explore combines two elegant sustainable technologies - airships and renewable electricity - and puts them to work on the oft-neglected (but increasingly significant) issue of disaster relief. It recently won 1st place in its category at the 2008 ACIDO Rocket Show.

Air travel is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions. That problem is compounded because, unlike other industries, there is currently very little investment in alternatives. One potential option is airships (lighter-than-air craft) because they are inherently extremely efficient - by George Monbiot’s reckoning, their impact is 80-90% lower than jets. The problem with historical attempts at building a modern airship is that they’ve begun at a massive scale, which makes attracting venture capital much more difficult. The goal of my thesis, thus, was to produce an airship at a modest scale, fulfilling a present need, to act as a transitionary element towards a more sustainable aerospace industry based around airships.

Solarial is an unmanned airship that provides mobile support infrastructure for disaster relief and remote communities, generating renewable energy and supplying communications links where they are needed most. Utilizing a skin coated in thin film photovoltaics, and a reversible drive propeller/wind turbine, it delivers clean energy via tether cable. Housing a suite of telecommunications equipment, Solarial also acts as a relay station for radio and cellular telephone signals, aiding the coordination of relief operations.

More technical details and images after the jump.