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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.""
Perhaps they could team up with some Earth Sciences researchers doing work on crater formation...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
All expeirements should end in some kind of explosion! What good is being a scienctist if you don't get to blow shit up?!?
> "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."
Revised for 2006: "We'll settle for one out of three these days... as long as you have a hell of a lot of it to compensate."
Then again, the British did usher in the passener jet age with the Comet.
and that will be obvious after my question........
but couldn't they build it to survive impact into the ocean, and then retrieve it?
I seem to remember the US space program doing this when they first went to the moon. And that man who singlehandedly built the rocket and went to the moon. What was his name? Apollo Creed? Anyways Tom Hanks was really great in that movie. Forest Gump I think it was.
On its descent the engine is expected to reach a top speed of Mach 7.6 or over 9,000km/ hour.
I think crash is a bit of an understatement!
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
i realize everyone thinks they're cute by making cracks about how we don't want to test planes by crashing them, but it's actually pretty awesome that we're to the point where we can get all of the info we need about in-flight stuff in just 6 seconds, and that we don't have to worry about making the plane able to land in order to test the engine. it should speed up development time, and who knows, maybe a plane flight to tokyo won't put you in danger of deep vein thrombosis. =p
good job, brits.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
I'm sure they could suggest hundreds of places where they'd like to see a new crater. Two birds with one stone 'n' all that.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
(Hydrogen-fuelled ramjets are useless above Mach 5, but that's about when the scramjet should ignite, so you really wouldn't need a whole lot of additional acceleration at that point. If they've got the ignition point within the limit, you could even switch directly from one to the other.)
The other thing I don't like is that this is destructive testing. It's inescapable, given the approach they're using, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Their data collection has to be wireless, since no recording device is going to survive a mach 7 impact, but wireless is relatively slow. This means that they're going to be limited in what they can collect - what parameters, what accuracy, what resolution, etc.
Normally, this wouldn't matter a great deal. But we're talking mach 7 speeds in a far denser atmosphere than most existing hypersonic travel (such as the shuttle re-entry) have taken place in. I believe there have been two successful scramjet flights in the past, so we have a little information on what happens under those conditions, but it seems somewhat... brave... if they are assuming they can interpolate between the few data points they'll be able to collect -and- extrapolate beyond the six seconds of flight.
Again, I'm sure they have their reasons, but for novel engines under novel conditions, I'd have thought that getting as much data as humanly possible would be worth almost any additional effort.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
it can only be deemed a failure if it *doesn't* crash? -- jeek
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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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.
Until MythBusters decides to try this one!
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
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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The third one burned down, fell over, then crashed into the ground. But the fourth one stayed up!
Do you see a comment by "heatdeath" responded to by "LiquidCoooled."
Computational Chemistry products and services.
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.
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
Anything worth doing can be done in 6 seconds! ;)
... Windows 98. No, seriously, think about it:
The scientists will then have just six seconds to monitor its performance before the £1m engine eventually crashes into the ground.
Replace the word "scientists" with "consumers", "£1m" with "$5b", and "engine" with "OS." Also, add the phrase "If it boots," before the statement.
Latewire
And yet, when I tried to apply this in my Biology labs, the professors got REAL cranky...
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White