Slashdot Mirror
Air Force Builds Quiet Mach 6 Wind Tunnel
An anonymous reader writes "To help design 'scramjets' -- vehicles that'll travel thousands of miles per hour as they leave the atmosphere and zip around the globe -- the U.S. Air Force has just funded a wind tunnel that operates quietly at Mach 6. To get a quiet flow, the throat of the Mach 6 nozzle must be polished to a near-perfect mirror finish, eliminating roughness that would trip the flow."
Wikipedia on Scramjets. AC to avoid karma whoring..
neat scramjet pictures here.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
We undergrads are the guineapigs of science, the people who do the things no one else wants to... all in exchange for $20. And we LIKE IT!
they'll use a model, just like the used to before computers. Duh. a model is still "real" unless you take real to mean 1:1 scale with the final production model, or a "real" working aircraft. And they are not going to put all the work and money into building a fullsize or working one without having proven that the basic design is sound. and that can be done with a model.
Grad student 1: This job sucks.
Grad student 2 (turning on wind tunnel): No, it blows!
Thank you, I'll be here all day.
Even if it didn't kill you, you'd certainly be exhausted.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
From reading the article, I gather "quiet" is being used here as a technical term which is roughly synonymous with laminar, or lack of turbulence (rather than "gee I wish my vacuum cleaner were quiet").
Can anybody with the right background tell me whether that's the case?
You're correct, they mean "quiet" in a laminar sense. Mach 6 wind will sound pretty loud to human ears regardless of how turbulance-free it is, just because of the immense air pressure... but it won't be "noisy" loud.
As far as my background, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Executives at Gillette have announced the Mach 7 in response to Purdue's Mach 6 wind tunnel. "We simply cannot be outdone on Mach numbers."
When asked what the commercial for the Mach 7 will feature, the unnammed executive replied, "jet fighters, women, racecars, women, missiles, women, bullets...it will be more spectacular than watching the entire French airforce crash into a fireworks factory."
Please help metamoderate.
There will be two occupants in the cockpit of the future. A man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the man if he tries to touch anything.