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Brits To Crash Test a Scramjet
hywel_ap_ieuan writes "The BBC is reporting that a the "Hyshot consortium" will be testing a scramjet called Hyshot III in Australia on Friday. The fun part: "If everything goes to plan, the experiment will begin at a height of 35 km. As the engine continues its downward path the fuel in the scramjet is expected to automatically ignite. The scientists will then have just six seconds to monitor its performance before the £1m engine eventually crashes into the ground.""
This has been done before, at Woomera test range. The University of Queensland launched HyShot in 2002, and had a major success.
. htm
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/hyshot/default
Not a dupe. They tried this 5 years ago and it didn't work. Now they're trying it again.
FTA:
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At the speed the craft is traveling, crashing into a body of water isn't that different from crashing into a concrete wall. To allow the craft to survive, it has to decelerate first.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
ScramJet is the work of Australians Ray Stalker and Allan Paull who achieved the phenomenon with a budget of tins cans, string and glue
RTFA: "The scramjet engine, known as Hyshot III, has been designed by British defence firm Qinetiq."
There's this concept called "international collaboration". It's not actually impossible for a project to involve people from more than one country. Yes, and one of the Australians you name is in charge. But the scramjet engine that's being tested on Friday was designed by the British. A few days later they'll be testing another one that was designed in Japan. After that, there's an Australian-designed one lined up too.
We're talking big money international collaboration here. Stalker and Paull aren't working with a budget of tin cans any more.
Nasa failed with a team of hundreds and a 9 figure budget.
The first much-ballyhooed flight may have failed (because the Pegasus rocket exploded, not because of a problem with the scramjet), but the Hyper-X program is considered a rousing success, with two successful hypersonic flights and a new jet-powered speed record of Mach 9.6.
That being said, I applaud the efforts of the University of Queensland, who is helping push the limits of aerospace knowledge. If they can do that on a shoestring budget, then that's all the better.
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However scramjets do not begin to work until they reach five times the speed of sound.
All scramjets, including this one, use rockets to get the engine up to speed - scramjets don't work at subsonic speeds.
They're trying to test an engine design here. Would you rather have them spend 200M building a whole craft to test an engine that's likely to be used only once? They're a long way from an anything that could actually be used for something practical, so cheapest is best as long as it moves the ball forward.
err. more importantly, the freakin' jet engine!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Whittle
entertainingly, the new US show "American Inventor" credited the invention of the motor car and the computer to the Americans last week. doooooh!
meanwhile, this scramjet isn't even by the brits, it the aussies. It's being reported by the BBC, hence the confusion
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
The engineering behind the ramjet and scramjet couldn't be any more different. Ramjets are basically scramjet engines that purposefully slow the air intake so that combustion can occur. In a scramjet the big problem is that the air is moving so fast that when you ignite the fuel/air mixture, the combustion will actually take place outside the engine. It would be ridiculous to slow the air, so the problem lies in how you get the mixture to ignite sooner. To this end they are testing ionizing mixtures, etc. Some scramjet geometries are highly classified.
Here's a good link that talks about the combustion issue: http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-10/iss-4/p24.htm l
And of course some general information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet
The test scramjet will be attached to a rocket that takes it up to 330km being dropping back to Earth. It should hit the requisite speed at 35km.
Also, what do you propose for a simple up & down trajectory that isn't parabolic?
As for destructive testing, there would need to be a lot more work done to save a prototype that will never be used again and the primary datapoint they are looking doesn't require much resolution.
"Did it light? Good."
KISS!
The automobile is one of those trophy inventions that every country would like to take credit for and no one country really can. Considering that Henry Ford made it practical with the assembly line, I think we've got at least as much claim as the frenchmen who made an off-road steam engine or the British who poked around with internal combustion.
Actually, it would seem that the Germans can quite legitimately take credit for the car. Three people in particular are responsible for inventing the major components of the car engine: Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach and Karl Benz. They had a whole automobile industry on the go before Henry Ford streamlined the production process (1913). Ford did do a great deal to make cars much more popular, but he was more an industrialist than an inventor.
The French industry was based largely on designs by Maybach, and I'm not sure that the English had very much to do with the internal combustion engine used in cars - the valve gear came from George Stephenson (the Englishman who also invented the steam engine), but the use of petroleum, the injection system, accelerator and so on were all developed by the three Germans. We do, of course, have to thank the English for pneumatic inflatable tyres (some guy by the name of John Dunlop, in particular) - without which, we'd have a very bumpy ride.
-- Steve