Hydrogen-Powered Sea Cheetah Ocean Skimmer Will Make You Want to Ditch Your Porsche

1 month ago - 6 October 2024, autoevolution
Hydrogen-Powered Sea Cheetah Ocean Skimmer Will Make You Want to Ditch Your Porsche
There's a very discreet push these days to advance wing-in-ground-effect vehicles. Both private companies and the military are looking at ways of taking advantage of this technology to find new ways to transport people and cargo, fast and effectively, over large bodies of water.

Ground effect is a term used to describe the tendency of aircraft wings to generate more lift when they're flying close to a fixed surface, be it land or water. It occurs thanks to the difference in speed of the air that flows over and under the wings, and it allows vehicles to move at relatively fast speeds without needing as much fuel as higher up in the air.

In a nutshell, the ground effect is created when wingtip vortices and downwash are disrupted by the ground or water surface. This creates lower induced drag, and it's something that is experienced including by conventional airliners when taking off and landing.

History recorded several ground effect vehicles over the years, the most famous of them all being the Hughes H-4 Hercules, aka the Spruce Goose, developed by Howard Hughes in the late 1940s, and the Soviet Caspian Sea Monster the Americans accidentally stumbled upon by means of spying in the late 1960s.

The ground effect idea never really caught on back then for various reasons, but it is being resurrected in modern days for both civilian and military use. Over the past few months alone two such projects have stepped into the spotlight.

The first is the Liberty Lifter program ran by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It's an effort meant to come up with a ground-effect machine capable of military gear, soldiers, and supplies.

The DARPA requirements call for the thing to fly at 100 feet (30 meters) above the surface of the water, but also to be able to climb to 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) if that's something that needs to be done. The Liberty Lifter should be capable of lifting 220,000 pounds (100 tons) of cargo.

Two projects are currently being considered by DARPA, one coming from General Atomics and the Maritime Applied Physics Corporation, and the other from Boeing's Aurora Flight Sciences and Gibbs & Cox.

The second ground effect vehicle currently in the works is the civilian Viceroy Seaglider, the work of a startup called Regent Craft. The thing is supposed to serve the needs of coastal and island communities.

The Viceroy is currently in the process of having its prototype made. When complete, the battery electric vehicle will be capable of carrying 12 passengers and a crew of two (or cargo weighing as much as 3,500 pounds / 1,600 kg) at speeds of 180 mph (290 kph), and at altitudes of just of 30 to 60 feet (9 to 18 meters) above sea level.

And now comes word about a third such design. This one is for now unnamed, and is the work of another startup, based in Miami, called Sea Cheetah. Not much about it is known at the moment, but the few details we do known paint a pretty interesting picture.

The Sea Cheetah wing-in-ground-effect vehicle is, too, meant to serve coastal and island needs. It has been primarily imagined as a people hauler – you know, drive your Porsche right up to the pier, park it there, and climb aboard for a trip to your private island – but also as something that can haul cargo.

The design should be capable of traveling at speeds of 155 mph (250 kph, roughly ten times faster than what an average boat can do), while flying at just ten feet (three meters) above the highest wave. The range is unknown, but it should be in the hundreds of miles.

The Sea Cheetah is sort of electric as well, but it burns hydrogen instead of electrons. This way of doing things will allow the ocean skimmer to fly with no emissions, while at the same time not needing to be constantly recharged.

The way it was built and the fuel it uses should allow the vessel, as per the company, to carry three times more payload that aircraft and vessels in the same class, while traveling ten times more fuel efficient.

The project seems to just get started. At the end of September Sea Cheetah announced it struck a deal with hydrogen supplier H3 Dynamics. The two companies plan to build not only the vessel, but also the hydrogen network meant to keep it going, including hydrogen generation, storage and fueling.

You may wonder why this new-found interest in ground-effect vehicles, especially in the civilian world.

Aside from the clear advantages this design has over the usual maritime transport solutions in terms of speed and range, a ground effect machine will also be cheaper to make and operate. In the case of the Sea Cheetah, for instance, the fact that it travels at only ten feet off the surface takes it out of FAA jurisdiction and places it in that of the Coast Guard. And that significantly cuts down the cost of making it and getting it approved.

As such, they’ll be flown not by aircraft pilots, but more or less by boat captains, which kind of opens the doors for pretty much everyone to have access to the cockpit.

Sea Cheetah describes its idea as the "world's first hydrogen-electric wing-in-ground effect vessel," and that’s something that surely deserves a follow-up. We'll keep an eye out for more details and bring them to light as soon as they emerge. 

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