Launch HN: HyLight (YC S23) – Hydrogen airships to inspect energy infrastructure
Energy infrastructure operators (utility companies) struggle with conducting precise inspections of their assets. It is extremely important for them because they need to make sure that the network is in good condition to avoid outages and leaks. This infrastructure has big impacts when it is malfunctioning. For instance, methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure represent 4% of global carbon emissions every year (and approx. $7B worth of losses in Northern America and Europe).
Gas and power networks are physically so large (more than 47M miles globally) that millions of miles of inspections must be done each year. Currently the most used solution is helicopters (used on 90% of inspections). Helicopters are dangerous, have a high carbon footprint and are costly to use. Plus, helicopter service providers have to go as fast as they can to save their margins. So the data quality is not optimal at all.
Our airship (the “HyLighter”) does exactly what is needed to gather a lot of precise information from the air. It flies slowly and can hover almost indefinitely, it consumes little energy, allowing great range for inspections. It can simultaneously mount all the sensors that are required for the inspections (HQ cameras, LiDAR, infrared, leak detection devices...). Plus, due to its size, we can write stuff on it to tell nearby residents what we are doing.
How does it work? It is basically a drone airship. We use a lighter-than-air gas in the envelope (helium or hydrogen) for buoyancy. We have a H2 tank and fuel cell transforming H2 into power for all the systems. In terms of engines we built 2 gyros (gyroscopes engines) at the rear and front of the airship. They allow us to have vectorial thrust and therefore to be extremely maneuverable. The sensors are fixed under the HyLighter on gimbals and can easily “follow” the linear infrastructure that is inspected.
When we began working on H2 and drones, we quickly realized that there was a problem with the weight of H2 tanks. The tanks have to be very strong to contain enough H2 which is extremely low in density. Then, we realized that we could use the "problem" inherent to H2 (very low density) to our advantage. We simply needed to use H2 as a lifting gas and power source. The envelope of the airship becomes the tank!
The HyLighter is more efficient than other current solutions. As mentioned, helicopters are the most-used at present. Compared to those, we use less energy, emit less GHG, have better data quality, and less risks for human beings as the HyLighter is unmanned. Compared to quad drones, we have longer flight time and more payload, allowing for various simultaneous sensors collecting data—we can simultaneously mount all the sensors that are required for the inspections (HQ cameras, LiDAR, infrared, leak detection devices). Compared to plane drones, our flight speed is lower so we can collect better data and less ground risk. Compared to satellites, we have a lot more precision (actually they can't even be used for most of our operational use cases).
The genesis of HyLight is that Théo wanted to work on new uses of H2 and drones when he was at school. He was joined by Martin who studied in the same engineering school, then by Josef who's Martin's BFF and then by me. I met Théo when we finished our studies in UC Berkeley last year and we all launched HyLight together. As we kept working on it, we gained more and more interest from pipeline and power line operators and we realized that there was indeed a big problem.
HyLight is at the stage where we have our first POCs. Our first paid flight is in the ...
212 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadIs this a joke? Isn't there a bit of a, uh, fire hazard? Aren't airships generally less controllable when affected by wind?
Concerning wind effects, we aim to operate with winds up to 10m/s (we did 8,5m/s last week so it's going well!). If the winds are higher we will wait it out (exactly like other aircrafts do ie drones and helicopter in certain cases).
I'm curious though about the tradeoffs of using the envelope as the tank vs. some other source. I'd assume it introduces more opportunity for leaks, and you have to "oversize" the envelope to stay aloft even after you've used all the fuel necessary for a tour. Is there a situation in which it would make more sense to keep your fuel and H2 separate?
Small feedback: the rotating text on your homepage transitions just a bit too quickly.
Concerning the tradeoffs. It does increase leak potential but the materials and glues are in constant improvements. And, we do not need to oversize the envelope this much because the airship is extremely energy efficient and consume very little energy (during all our flight test we are always amazed when we have 80% left of battery or H2 at the end of the flights). But yes, for now, we keep fuel and lighter than air gas separated and we will keep this possibility for a long time.
Thank you for the feedback!
How are you addressing safety with your design?
There are special materials and glue that ensure safety from electricity and fire hazards. The people building their balloons use that kind of materials and it works!
I don't think they're as dangerous as people think. If they ignite they go up in a whoosh, not a bang. The only debris is your payload, now falling. So as as your payload is not also made out of flammable material (as was the case with the Hindenburg) then I don't think it's any more of a fire threat than having power lines near trees is in the first place. Up is conveniently the right direction for a ball of flame.
Of course all of this goes out the window if you let it become entangled in a tree...
Do you have any video that you could share about the lighting on fire of the balloon?
We lost contact with the payload almost immediately and never recovered it, but lost enthusiasm to try a second time.
We had bought two balloons just in case we needed a second. Waited for a rainy day and took the second one camping. I wish I had grabbed a video, but some among us were overly paranoid about creating evidence.
It was just a big blue orb and a whooshing sound. Presumably there were some flaming bits of rubber involved but we weren't able to recover them (we made the tether too long, out of fear for it being more dramatic than it was, that it was hard to get a good idea of what specifically went on).
Has there ever been a burning man effigy with a lighter-than-air component? That would be a good venue for exploring the dynamics of baloon fires (it could tethered such it wasn't above anybody when it went up).
(Aluminum powder is used in propellant, it was used to coat the Hindenburg, therefore the Hindenburg was coated in rocket propellant.)
Also, just out of curiosity, how far do your airships travel between refueling, given what you would consider normal conditions and a standard payload?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Concerning your question on range: We will easily fly an entire day without refueling (and more), basically an entire day means 200 miles.
We are not at that stage yet, but we can't wait to test it!
"A covered Hydrogen filling station must have electricity for ventilation." Agree or disagree?
And what about microwave energy beaming? Can microwave wireless energy transfer cause a hole in an airship? What about freak lightning storms while inspecting high energy power lines in a balloon filled with flammable and explosive gas?
It looks like it may be possible to store Hydrogen in Sodium Bicarbonate.
There are aerospace-grade hydrogen tanks that aren't supposed to explode in a crash landing, but what about midair collision and war?
There are people working on drones that hover in midair (that do not add flight and ground risk) that efficiently use the air currents too.
I'm afraid [this airship firm] hasn't done a sufficient level of testing to determine how easily the product can become a war liability, and I don't think FAA should clear Hydrogen airships for energy infrastructure inspection.
There is a shortage of Helium (and 3He and 4He for fusion), which the sun makes out of Hydrogen with heat and radiation from fusion and fission.
Our helium supplies come from natural gas wells. In some areas the natural gas contains enough helium to be worth separating and storing.
If a small drone explodes and takes down an electricity pylon in nowheresville in the middle of a war, I reckon most people would be very grateful that’s all that happened and willing to fund drones just to draw fire from more important areas and nothing else.
Why are you worried about microwaves, or a flaming gas bag during a war? Rockets seem to supersede those concerns entirely. Or the much more valuable infrastructure targets that would also be vulnerable if a craft like this was vulnerable.
Re freak storm; then it catches fire, like many other things that get struck by lightning.
It is feasible that microwave power beaming or similar could affect the wind or the airship directly.
Drones are very inexpensive. Ukraine's latest are probably sufficient to cause operational failure for airships.
It is appropriate to be concerned about flaming gas bags positioned over critical energy infrastructure.
We don't know how to fly a flaming gas bag out of the way when there is a Hydrogen fire.
They don't actually - they cause pressurised containers (propane for example) to outgas but they don't cause an explosion or even ignition.
You can shoot clean through a propane tank with a 50 cal bullet and not even see (from a distance) the effect .. unless the air temp and humidty is enough to condense water about the outgassing.
Go and check out some "let's shoot a propane tank" videos - no explosions UNLESS someone rigs an ignition source (lit flare, etc).
You've been getting your 'facts' from Hollywood.
Indeed we easily could find some pre-existing videos of pressurized cylinders exploding and there being flames. I don't think you're going to convince me that flammable pressurized canisters do cannot cause thrust when punctured.
Does there have to be another existing fire for punctured [propane] tanks to rocket upward like in the movies?
Does a drone RPG carry a light? Really.
> aluminum aircraft contacting a building cause enough of a spark
Read the accident report - static electricity, not a bullet, not a pressurised propane container.
> Does there have to be another existing fire for punctured [propane] tanks to rocket upward like in the movies?
Usually a pulley system or another Hollywood trick.
> Does a drone RPG carry a light?
No. Also, not a bullet, it's a Rocket Propelled Grenade.
Just to clarify, here's a slow motion video of a bullet fired into an unsecured pressurised propane tank (small) with a lit flare next to it.
https://youtu.be/ptend5StNB8?t=62
You can see the tank outgassing and falling off the 44 gallon drum (doesn't "rocket into the air"), the gas eventually (in slow motion it takes a while) lights up from the lit flare and there's a dramatic fireball (burning gas) but no explosion as such - after all is over and done with the propane tank will look a little singed, have two holes in it, but won't look "exploded".
There are other videos with no flares .. much the same happens save there are no fireballs, the gas just expels and expands out into the atmosphere.
- static electricity
- lightning
- flame
- puncture
- midair collision
- birds, flying fish
- acts of war: projectiles, flames, jeers
- solar flares; Carrington events; EMP
- meteors, meteorites
- combinations thereof; static + puncture,
- chance presence of combustible gases and particulates; [grain dust,] + spark/static
And, frankly, flaming gas bag is not a serious threat. It would be neat to see, but a small undirected hydrogen fueled fire without access to any other fuel source is not scary. I'd be more concerned about the body of the deflated vessel causing a short than anything
Civilian aircraft aren't generally expected to be able to withstand midair collision or war. Why would this drone be any different?
Most aircraft today contain some kind of power storage that can ignite dangerously; 100LL or Jet-A in the case of airplanes and helicopters and some drones, lithium-ion batteries in the case of many drones and upcoming eVTOLs (and for aux power in many modern airplanes as well).
Regulatory frameworks and engineering practices are absolutely able to be used to consider the risks of fires in energy storage systems.
Rockets that contain hydrogen have self-destruct, and NASA doesn't want to load a rocket with Hydrogen while astronauts are onboard on the ground; though rocket fuel hydrogen is chilled and pressurized with lots of energy.
The true cost of guarding a hydrogen blimp that's guarding the critical infrastructure? Is it as much as guarding an upriver reactor cask that's under ordinance spec?
Compared to grid scale battery farms for energy storage, would Gravitational Potential Energy and/or CAES Compressed Air Energy Storage (which are less lossy, anyway) be less of a liability if in the flight path of a slow to fixed hydrogen airship?
Aerospace-grade [hydrogen, jet fuel,] tanks are probably more impact resistant than any airship ever?
Which critical energy facilities have procedures for handling a hydrogen airship in their airspace with and without a wind event?
Gravitational Potential Energy in old mines is enough energy storage for domestic US needs FWIU, but supercapacitors or ultracapacitors may be necessary to handle renewable load spikes when the sun shines across the grid.
My first thought as well. You'd likely need to make it a federal felony to shoot one and have an ad campaign to make it well known or I can't see these lasting 6 months in a rural setting.
That's not just a southern thing. I see the same all over the country.
Unfortunately it is also exceedingly likely that the folks who shoot at road signs as their particular outrage against government are most likely to think that surveillance drones are there to spy on them, and not inspect infrastructure. I don't think regulations or laws matter to those folks.
Nevertheless, we will soon test what happened when we shout our flying HyLighters.
But a blimp, high up and clearly doing something? Nah, it'd be fine.
I am not a lawyer, but is is a very open question if you're flying low enough someone can visually sight you and shoot you down over their property, whether or not that this is a violation of the law /for unmanned vehicles/. Drones in particular have become a serious nuisance and many property owners have taken actions against them in the US triggering court cases, most of which haven't yet reached their conclusion.
EDIT to add that the rules here even vary by state in the US, in some states you own 83 feet over your property of airspace, in others it could be as much as 400 feet (above 400 feet is controlled airspace under the jurisdiction of the FAA). Generally speaking, shooting any aircraft, jamming any radio signal, or shining laser pointers on any aircraft is already federally illegal in the US and violates FAA/FCC regulations, but it's not clear that these regulations are actually constitutional and enforceable, or that it cannot be an act of self-defense to shoot down a low-flying aircraft intruding on your property.
I think you're conflating issues. At least where I grew up, people didn't shoot road signs out of anger at the government. They did it out of boredom. Sometimes as a competition with friends, sometimes alone. I never partook myself.
Please don't post nationalistic flamebait (regardless of nation). We've had to ask you this more than once before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Note: The rate limiting you have imposed on my user meant that I had to wait several hours to post this reply.
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars. Unfortunately your account has a history of doing that, so we've rate limited it. If you build up a track record of using HN as intended, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to take a look and hopefully remove the rate limit.
This is bullshit.
I spent a lot of time attempting to contribute quality content here. I feel like you didn't dig deep enough in what I've contributed earlier before deciding that a particular 'nationalistic' comment about the shootings in the US meant that I should be shut down.
Examples of pieces I'm proud of:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37275940
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37258787
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37247246
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37216687
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36170885
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35831689
Do you though? Shouldn't it be a balance?
I'm still not exactly sure why I can only post about 5 comments/24h.
[0] https://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/h2_sa...
You need all three.
Imagine the bonus is a ball of fire in the sky for the winning shot!
My impression of the power lines in my area is that the top wire is just structural. I could imagine something (lighter than air or not) crawling along it rather than floating free. Of course you'd need to only do that if you knew that the additional drag wouldn't subsequently damage the thing you're inspecting, but since you're an inspection company, that kind of assessment shouldn't be too hard.
There are actually some startups working on robots that would hang/crawl from the lines. But, I feel like our clients like the "remote sensing" capacities and are not very much interested with (or even are afraid of) things touching their assets.
[1] https://tc.canada.ca/en/corporate-services/acts-regulations/...
Page 44: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/aircraft/air_cert/de...
Glad to help!
One limitation I could see for your business model is that airships can only be flown in a controlled direction at rather slow wind speeds. That is because they just have such a huge attack surface and the motors have limited thrust.
Did you do an estimate how many days per year you could fly your vehicle in a given economic area of interest? I fly balloons in Switzerland and I think you can get at most 100 days of good flight conditions a year. But yeah, with some climate data and your operational limitations you can probably estimate how many days you get in a given area...
We've made research and we aim to resist to 10 to 11m/s of wind speed. This would allow us to fly in 80% of regions of Europe, 80% of the time!
I used to work at a large offshore wind operator, and the approach we used there for leading-edge inspection of blades was a telephoto lens from a neighboring turbine. As anything involving technicians off-shore, this was very expensive.
I have a dream that some day there will be airships floating around cities, ferrying passengers and freight, and they will float only 30-100 meters above the tallest buildings.
having tight flight rules (eg to deal with wind) would be a problem in a lot of locations...
Would be interested to learn about your approach with computer vision for detecting defects. I worked closely with a project some time ago where we flew overhead lines with a drone. We had some issues with background separation - given the conductor hung at varying heights and the drone flew at a constant height, the camera was always refocusing - it was hard to get consistent results. It ended up resulting in false positives more than anything.
I'm also interested in how you discern defects. Some sort of anomaly detection? ML? If so, how did you source training data? Also would be interested in how you determine speciation for underclearance of lines.
So many cool elements of this to nerd out about. Congrats on launch, will be following closely!
For now, we've focused a lot of our time on building the vector to gather the data. We did POC of code for real time power line following (so power line recognition and follow). We know that there are a lot of startups on this field of data analysis so we began scouting to see the level that is reached today. And decide if we should build our own model or use another one.
You do say that you will stay a suitable distance away though, so that is good.
No.
Relays and transformers?
Yes.
Regular drones are awesome to make short missions (you need to check one electrical pylone or a small bridge - take a drone). But on bigger scale they don't have enough range to do this kind of operations. Also, they don't have enough payload. You can only fly with one camera, when the utilities need HQ camera, infrared, LiDAR etc. That's why they need to keep using helicopters.
Sorta like how railroads figured out it was much simpler operationally to have fewer types of locomotives, and use multiples on larger trains, rather than create dinosaurs like the DDA40x (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_DDA40X) that were ONLY useful in narrow circumstances.
Regular drones can't be used to inspect that much (too many drones required, too many pilots, too much aerial and ground risk - when regular drone fall they are lethal).
Airships won’t scale like that. You don’t have the benefit of tons of media companies buying airships to use as camera platforms.
Out of curiosity what kind of altitude would an actively inspecting drone be at? And what kind of support vehicles do you need? Like would it be possible for one team to co-ordinate the deployment of multiple drones from a single vehicle or they just don't fit?
On the economics and moat: You said that it's cheaper than helicopters but would it be cheaper than manned auto-gyros/gyrocopters? What about military drones and even civilian drones which will benefit from the trillions of dollars being dumped into battery technology, that will make them capable of flying longer distances? Would blimps be competitive against those?
Finally. I want to ask about forest fires, would your blimp have the economics to be used as surveillance tool against forest fires?
We've studied a lot batteries and drones and we don't think that drones will reach the specs we can get through a lighter than air aircraft. Even for civilian helicopters, today, they have between 2h and 3h of flight time usually. Military equipment won't be used for that kind of topic.
being able to hover efficiently would be a major win, and it seems like detecting mines isn't so much of a technical problem as a practical one...
This made me chuckle. All-in on hydrogen, huh?
On the surface this looks like a box ticking exercise, low cost wins. Is that not correct?
What does better quality data actually do for the customer?
And what does "more efficient" mean in this context?
I guess in some sense I'm saying that shouldn't the explanation for this be something like: "owners of gas pipelines need to meet regulations imposed by Federal Agency X. They are currently spending $y dollars on it. Using our product they can be compliant and only spend (y-large number)."
or: "owners of gas piplines are at risk of multi-billion dollar fines and lawsuits. Right now they can't properly measure where they are leaking gas. Our solution lets them find the problem spots and only costs $y per year for them to mitigate their large risk"