Giancarlo Zema Design Group releases images of its latest solar-powered vertiport design, inspired by the Hamamelis plant

Gian­car­lo Zema Design Group (GZDG) has unveiled its lat­est solar-pow­ered ver­ti­port design, which is based on the Hamamelis plant and fea­tures a floor capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing over 1.5 MW of elec­tric­i­ty to charge eVTOL air­craft.

The com­pa­ny entered the mar­ket last year after releas­ing images of its Baobab ver­ti­port design with EHang. This lat­est project is named after the Chi­nese plant capa­ble of launch­ing its seeds remote­ly to per­pet­u­ate the species, and is in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ital­ian star­tups Walle Mobil­i­ty and Man­ta Air­craft.

On GZDG’s web­site, the Hamamelis is described as ‘an eco-sus­tain­able project with organ­ic and emo­tion­al shapes with large pho­to­volta­ic sur­faces, mul­ti-func­tion, con­tains with­in itself a series of com­mon areas, recep­tion, cafe­te­ria, restau­rant, exhi­bi­tion spaces, sur­round­ed by green out­door areas, fur­nished with prod­ucts and solu­tions for smart cities by Luminex­ence’.

Ide­al on both land and water, the 80m diam­e­ter steel and glass struc­ture with alu­mini­um pan­el cov­er opens upwards, pro­tect­ing the land­ing plat­form for elec­tric air­craft from the wind. The floor, with wire­less charg­ing, is made up of spe­cial lat­est gen­er­a­tion non-slip pho­to­volta­ic pan­els, pro­duced by the Eng­lish com­pa­ny Sola­pave and which inte­grate inside LED plates for light­ing and noc­tur­nal sig­nage.

eVTOL Insights caught up Giuseppe Carusi, Part­ner and Senior Project Man­ag­er at GZDG, to get some addi­tion­al insights into the com­pa­ny’s lat­est ver­ti­port.

GC: “It’s already a pre-engi­neer­ing project and at GZDG we know the tech­nol­o­gy that goes in it and we design that tech­nol­o­gy. We’re not releas­ing the full project, but right now I want­ed to show some ren­ders. It can be used at any point or any­where in the world. The advan­tage of the Hamamelis design is that it can be float­ing, held up on poles or even put on land.”

Q: Is ver­sa­til­i­ty cru­cial from a design point of view? In that a ver­ti­port should­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly be a one-size-fits-all design, but a struc­ture that can be adapt­ed to suit dif­fer­ent cities in dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ments?

GC: “Exact­ly. For instance, we kept places like Venice in mind because there’s no avail­able land. But there’s a lagoon and lots of space on the water that we can utilise. The city is nat­u­ral­ly float­ing on poles, so with keep­ing this in mind we want­ed a ver­sa­tile design that could fit any sit­u­a­tion.

“A float­ing struc­ture would cost more than the struc­ture on poles, which in turn would cost more than a struc­ture on land. But then, of course, with the same over­all design, we can fit three dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es. And of course the amount of solar pan­els will be able to pro­duce enough elec­tric­i­ty off grid to pow­er the whole ver­ti­port as far as illu­mi­na­tion is con­cerned.”

Q: What kind of col­lab­o­ra­tion has GZDG had with Walle Mobil­i­ty and Man­ta Air­craft in regards to the Hamamelis ver­ti­port?

GC: “This design was total­ly con­ceived by us. But at this stage, we don’t yet have enough ele­ments from Man­ta’s air­craft [ANN] to be able to cus­tomise it prop­er­ly for their util­i­sa­tion. Of course, this can and will be done even­tu­al­ly at the point where the ver­ti­port would be suit­ed to them.

“We kept in mind a sit­u­a­tion which would be use­ful for more brands all over the world, because a ver­ti­port in gen­er­al, espe­cial­ly if run by a ser­vice provider like Walle, would want air­craft from oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers to land too. So we need to keep a cer­tain avail­abil­i­ty of use cas­es for every type of manned drone. It’s suit­able both for autonomous aer­i­al vehi­cles (AAVs) and long-range air­craft. Man­ta’s air­craft is long-range, so the Hamamelis ver­ti­port can be con­fig­ured to fit their vehi­cle right now.” 

Q: Are you able to dis­close any spec­i­fi­ca­tions about the ver­ti­port?

GC: “Not real­ly, but this design is quite mod­u­lar in the sense that it’s basi­cal­ly a round struc­ture. We can grow the cir­cum­fer­ence and diam­e­ter as much as we want, or shrink it.

“So let’s say the kind of cir­cu­lar design allows us to see, to scale it accord­ing to the kind of air vehi­cle or eVTOL air­craft that is going to fly. This means that more or less, the look will be the same and dimen­sions will change based on require­ments.

“The solar pan­elling is all over the rooftops but as you can see in the design, we have all the make sense ele­ments which are already exist­ing. It’s not only the­o­ret­i­cal and designed, but actu­al­ly these are exist­ing prod­ucts that we have avail­abil­i­ty of. So under­neath each ver­ti­port, each solar palm tree will pro­duce up to three kilo­watts an hour. The solar pan­els on the land­ing pads from Sola­pave would gen­er­ate 20 kilo­watts per land­ing, which would be enough to charge any VTOL air­craft.

“We’re aim­ing to low­er the car­bon foot­print and make the ver­ti­port as effi­cient as pos­si­ble, so run­ning costs are reduced as a whole.”

Q: How many eVTOL air­craft could land on this par­tic­u­lar ver­ti­port design?

GC: “It’s actu­al­ly a vari­able and can be cus­tomised in this case. In the ini­tial design, we have thought of three which makes sense, but this is a small unit so we can scale it up and add in more land land­ing pads if nec­es­sary.”

Q: Can you tell us more about what you’ll be work­ing on in 2022?

GC: “We’ve been get­ting requests from oth­er coun­tries which have seen the ver­ti­port con­cepts we’re work­ing on, so there are a num­ber of oppor­tu­ni­ties. Fly­ing in cities is a lit­tle bit fur­ther down the line, but fly­ing in parks and rur­al areas is much eas­i­er. The vehi­cles are non-pol­lut­ing and util­i­sa­tion in these areas would not cause a great dan­ger to peo­ple like it could in the cities.

“An exam­ple would be some­where like Naz­ca in Peru, where you’d need an aero­plane to look at the Naz­ca Lines as you can only see them from above the ground. Imag­ine if you have a ver­ti­port and drones fly­ing around? It would be a big mon­ey saver and in many ways, a lot more effi­cient than what is being done now. And it could already be imple­ment­ed.

“So we are look­ing at push­ing this type of air mobil­i­ty before we get to the final urban air mobil­i­ty which every­body is aim­ing for. I think there’s a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ty in this field which could gen­er­ate a good income as well, as there are eVTOLs which can fly right now.“We are look­ing at all the oppor­tu­ni­ties right now. One exam­ple is in the Mal­dives, where we’re design­ing a resort with a ver­ti­port so peo­ple can hop between islands for sight­see­ing tours.”