Exploring effective configuration design of a winged airship

Aim. The introduction of the full paper discusses existing problems and then proposes our exploration, which is explained in sections 1, 2 and 3. To solve two critical problems for the flight of a winged airship in near space at low speed, section 1 uses rarefied air to produce the lift of a winged airship and balance its weight and the limited solar energy to produce the power needed by the winged airship for long-time flight. Section 2 designs the configuration of the winged airship; its core consists of: (1) the lift and buoyancy integration mode and the day-night energy saving mode are used for the winged airship; (2) we use the iteration method to calculate the design parameters of the winged airship, the iteration flow chart being given in the block diagram shown in Fig. 3. Section 3 designs the optimal parameters of the winged airship; its core is that we use the NSGA (non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm) to perform the multi-objective optimization of the winged airship; the design results, given in Tables 2 and 3 and Fig. 4, and their analysis show preliminarily that: (1) the total weight of lithium batteries used at night is much smaller; (2) the volume of winged airship is much smaller; (3) its flight velocity is much greater than that of the airship in near space. Section 4 draws the preliminary conclusions that: (1) the winged airship is suitable for the payload of Doppler effect such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR); (2) the size of the airship in near space which is obtained by using our design method is close to that of the high-altitude airship published by Lockheed Martin Inc, indicating that our design method for the winged airship is effective.