Feasability Studies for a Bionic Blimp with a Fish-Like Propulsion Systems

Lighter-Than-Air vehicles are a promising class of transport systems for heavy cargo, stratospheric platforms, but also for surveillance or animal observations. Classical propulsion systems composed of piston engines with gears and propellers show a limited efficiency. An interesting alternative propulsion system would by a Dielectric Elastomer driven active fish-like deformable airship. This concept would have big advantages, as it promises to be energy efficient, noiseless and free of direct pollution. In this work a summary of the integrated interdisciplinary design process carried out in the past two years will be given. Theoretical as well as experimental work was carried out, which shows, that nowadays technologies are available to build such a system. The main results are presented and discusses within this paper.