Carrying blades with a balloon

In very complicated wind farms blades and sometimes other components are carried by helicopters – an expensive solution, to be used only as “last option”.

What I’ve discovered today is that a balloon was used by CL CargoLifter to carry the blades in a small scale test made for Nordex at the former airport of Neuhardenberg using a 9 meters balloon on December 2007.

CL CargoLifter GmbH & Co. KG is company founded by former Cargolifter AG shareholders - Cargolifter AGfiled for bankruptcy in 2002, trying to develop an "Air Crane" to carry bulk load flying.

The balloon was filled with almost 300 cubic meters of hydrogen in nearly 90 minutes, and clinged at a winch. After the test, the balloon was quickly deflated, in only 5 minutes.

According to their study, a 40 meters diameter balloon is needed to lift a mounded rotor with 3 blades.

 

This entry was posted in Cranes and special transport and tagged , , by Francesco Miceli. Bookmark the permalink.

About Francesco Miceli

Hello! My name is Francesco and I'm a civil engineer specialized in EPC (that is, "turnkey") wind farms projects. I'm currently based in Hamburg, Germany and I'm developing several interesting project all around the world - southern Europe, LATAM and various other countries. If you want to contact me please don't leave a comment in the blog (I don't check them very often) - you can use the contact form. You can write me in English, Spanish and Italian. To find a (somewhat concise) description of my non-wind business activities you can visit my webpage - www.francescomiceli.com If you want to know more about my work, here you can download my CV - www.windfarmbop.com/CV_Francesco_Miceli.pdf Hope you like the blog! Francesco

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.