Lift Compensation for Pressure Differentials of Stratospheric Airships in Super‐Cooling Conditions

When stratospheric airships encounter high‐altitude cold clouds at night during long‐duration flights, they undergo a significant drop in internal pressure, facing the risk of pressure loss. The passive way of counteracting pressure loss by avoiding or jettisoning ballast is both inefficient and nonrecyclable. To seek more efficient and favorable solutions for airships in controlling and utilizing pressure and altitude, the necessary aerodynamic parameters, such as aerodynamic forces, moments, and propeller thrust, were obtained through the computational fluid dynamics method. A static equilibrium model of the airship and coupling compensation models for the pressure differential, altitude, temperature, and energy‐consumption ratio in super‐cooling conditions were constructed. The influence of aerodynamic lift on adjusting the pressure differential and altitude was investigated. The results show that initiating a flight speed of over 15 m/s with a maximum static‐trim pitch angle of 6° in advance of encountering cold clouds at night could achieve a compensation of more than 6°C and could provide a pressure differential increment of more than 200 Pa in super‐cooling conditions, corresponding to an altitude increment of 200 m and a normalized energy‐consumption ratio of about 1.21. Thus, the approach provides an effective, feasible solution for compensating for the pressure differential and altitude of airships.