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Superjet Technology Nears Reality After Successful Australia Test (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo: A two-hour flight from Sydney to London is a step closer to reality after the latest successful test Wednesday of hypersonic technology in the Australian desert. A joint US-Australian military research team is running a series of 10 trials at the world's largest land testing range, Woomera in South Australia, and at Norway's Andoya Rocket Range. Hypersonic flight involves traveling at more than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5). Scientists involved in the program -- called Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation (HIFiRE) -- are developing an engine that can fly at Mach 7, Michael Smart of the University of Queensland told AFP. He added that the scramjet was a supersonic combustion engine that uses oxygen from the atmosphere for fuel, making it lighter and faster than fuel-carrying rockets. The experimental rocket in the trial on Wednesday reached an altitude of 278 kilometers and a target speed of Mach 7.5, Australia's defense department said. The first test of the rocket was conducted in 2009. The next test is scheduled for 2017 with the project expected to be completed in 2018. It's only a matter of time before such high-speed transportation technology is implemented into our infrastructure. Last week, Hyperloop One conducted a successful test of its high speed transportation technology in the desert outside Las Vegas.
What is this travesty of mischemistry? "engine that uses oxygen from the atmosphere for fuel, making it lighter and faster than fuel-carrying rockets"
Since supersonic commercial transportation has never been tried before, I predict a bright future for this technology. Perhaps Great Britain and France might embark on a joint venture and see what happens.
uses oxygen from the atmosphere for fuel
So that would be ozone I take it? What could possibly go wrong?
There's not even a market for the Concorde, and I've been waiting decades for this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
but kudos the people in this article, there is real hardware here, and not just CGI or vague optimism about 3D printers.
Supersonic air transport had its ascendency in the 1970s back when businesspeople were prepared to pay thousands of dollars to prevent being incommunicado for more than a few hours. Being out of touch might cost them thousands, so they were willing to pay to prevent it. Fairly soon, people will be able to make calls from planes anywhere on the planet, stream video and be online at 35,000 feet - All from the comfort of an $8,000 first-class seat. No one will be incommunicado anymore, so the business driver to get from A to B in as little time as possible won't matter as much any more.
The future belongs to aircraft like the future generations of the 787 and A350. Subsonic, but comfortable, quiet, and nearly able to fly between any two points on the globe without stopping.
Successful test of the engine in a small experimental device is hardly justify thinking we will soon do this in our lifetime. Practical and safety issues about, not the least of which is the fact that it will have to be the most complicated computer controlled object ever to fly.
No pilot will be able to control a hypersonic plane when something goes WRONG. Computers will have to take over from other computers to control a malfunctioning hypersonic aircraft.
"about" should have been 'abound'
Sorry
remember when NASA actually had a budget to make cool things too?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
https://youtu.be/jQM6b9RonXM Planes That Never Flew - The American SST - Boeing 2707
I was just watching this earlier today. The two problems have been: sonic booms over populated areas, and necessity of Titanium to handle the heat at the leading edges. At least when this documentary was made, the metal choice still had no better solution than back in the 70's, and it was too expensive then. The development of an American SST that could do Mach 3 was mandated by Kennedy, and they could not deliver. The Concorde was permitted to do supersonic flight only over the Atlantic.
I don't know if many have experienced the shock wave of breaking the sound barrier. I was in a mobile home in northern Arizona when some fighter jets broke mach. The trailer rocked and I thought it might be an earthquake. It isn't merely like a thunderstorm as some say.
is hardly justify thinking we will soon do this in our lifetime.
Careful. The right technology can grow pretty darned quick. Or you could live longer than you think. Certainly my grandmother, 93, has seen quite a lot of innovation in aviation in her lifetime . She was born in 1923...
Outer space starts at an altitude of 100 km. Why the fuck would they make a test of an air-breathing engine suborbital?
(Yes, I know the pressure at 100 km isn't zero. However, if the scientists are actually claiming that .032 Pa is enough to prevent flame-out in a scramjet, I'll be very surprised.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't get the pessimism.
The first jet engine was designed in the early 1930s. The first airplane to use a jet engine was in the late 30s and the first jet airliner came about in the early 1950s. So figure a bit over 10 years. Now, there was a war going on and lots of research into jets was going on. So we'll double it and say 25 years.
Now, I'll grant you that's borderline for my lifetime, based on average age of death, but it's not entirely unfeasible to believe that I could make a trip on one.
Also, I'm not sure how you'd consider it to be complicated. These things are flying around at 100,000 feet or so. It's not like they have to dodge much for other aircraft up there. The engines themselves are pretty simple. What makes them so complicated?
That thing looked pretty interesting but there hasn't been any news about it for over a year. Is it still in development?
The blub says it "Uses atmospheric oxygen for fuel." Which is exactly wrong. It uses atmospheric oxygen AS AN OXIDIZER. Not as a fuel. The fuel is what the oxygen burns. And it still carries fuel onboard. FFS.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
Might have something to do with the energy cost of pushing an object through air that at speed has the fluid dynamic characteristics of molasses; might have to do with the challenge of maintaining structural integrity of an object being pushed through molasses; might be that pushing the object through molasses is actually the easier engineering problem; might have something to do with the lack of a need to push an object through molasses; ...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
The flight from AUS to the UK would be shorter than the line at the TSA?
hardly justify thinking we will soon do this in our lifetime
Probably what we will see in our lifetime is the military application of scramjets in hypersonic missiles.
You should look at the last SpaceX booster return. A fully automated rocket booster, lifted the second stage and the satellite to over 200Km, at speeds in excess of Mach 5, then turned round, came back into the atmosphere and landed on a moving barge in the Atlantic. All without human intervention once the "blue touch-paper was lit".
"The practical application of that is you could fly long distances over the Earth very, very quickly but also that it's very useful as an alternative to a rocket for putting satellites into space," Smart said.
You'd still need a rocket engine to get it up to speed to where a scramjet can start working, unless it was a hybrid design similar to how the SR71 worked, where at full speed most intake air bypassed the J-58 compressor and it operated closer to a ramjet.
Then the rocket would be needed again when reaching an altitude where there's not enough atmospheric oxygen to finally put the satellite into LEO. However, hopefully the craft will not have to carry nearly as much oxidizer to do it.
Oxygen from the air for combustion? Huygens did it back in 1680 in his first internal combustion engine. Oxygen from the air is a pretty well known way to power an internal combustion engine at this time.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I wonder if it's more complicated than the F-117 stealth attack aircraft that is inherently unstable at any speed in all three axes. Meaning without constant computer controlled input correction every 10 milliseconds or so, it would literally fall from the sky.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The engine isn't the only thing that needs development. The fastest military aircraft in the US inventory was the SR-71. It flew so fast that it was difficult to service due to the heat build up in flight. It would contract and expand a large amount due to heating as well. The air frame and control services are a challenge. To maintain a safe mach 7 aircraft is not a trivial matter. Particularly in a commercial aircraft where the risks that military pilots are willing to take are totally unacceptable.
*All* rockets are "fuel-carrying rockets". The oxygen is not fuel per se; it's the oxidizer for the fuel.
"... reached an altitude of 278 kilometers"
That is pretty high, for an oxygen breathing machine. It could have touched hands with IIS almost at that height. I wonder how much oxygen is available there.
Queensland University have been working on this engine for quite a while.
I had a short relationship with a girl in 1988 - one of her close friends was on the team, AND SHE NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT HIM - hence "short" above.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Difficult to service? Ok, yes, sort of. Because it used so many novel materials, and it was made mostly out of titanium alloy, and there were like only 50 SR-71 and AF/YF-12's built. No aircraft has run at its operating conditions, before or after, either.
Still, more reliable than a Formula One race car.
Supersonic air transport had its ascendancy in the 1970s because oil was cheap and plentiful, and the high bypass turbo fan had not been developed. Propulsive efficiency of a turbojet reaches its peak into the supersonic range, so Concorde wasn't as much of a gas-guzzler compared to something like a 707 as it would be now against modern jets. Factor in better aircraft/crew utilization and the thing could have been quite economical, particularly for business class travel.
Of course the sonic boom problem killed the viability even if the 747 hadn't come along so soon after. There were a lot of improvements they were planning for Concorde 2 that could have kept it in the running for quite a while on particular routes if this had not been the case.
There are several problems with extremely high-speed planes, especially the chemical (hydro-carbon) fuelled designs:
1. They are extremely damaging to the ozone layer and contribute a lot to global warming, because they spew pollution up there, not at ground level like cars, ships and diesel locomotives do.
2. The problem of earth-shaking sonic booms needs to be solved, but that doesn't appear possible per currently known laws of physics. Maybe if the Navier-Stokes equations of laminar flow could be solved, but that is still a million dollar open question in math. People no longer accept the wall-splitting shockwaves that was the norm during Cold War, when formations of jet fighter-bombers flew training sorties near or over heavily populated areas of Europe.
3. Very fast travel is an extremely dumb idea in an already over-populated world, where the decline of antibiotics against bacteria and the rise of new generations of viral illnesses threatens to create a perfect storm of pandemics. The WWI-ending global spanish flu epidemic killed a total of 80 million people in a world where travel was done by ships and steam-pulled trains at best. In fact several islands were spared only because of the slowness of ship-borne travel, as telegrams could reach them before calling to port.
Imagine a virus or y. pestis like bacteria, with the same infectious vigor as above, in a future world where masses of people zip by at Mach 7 and wonder if you could be already in boils before the news of a pandemic in Asia or Africa hits the world news media...
4. All in all, I just don't get it why people want to run around the globe like poisoned mice? Why don't more of them subscribe to the slow travel hip? In a closed tube flying at the edge of space you don't get to experience anything of the world, anyhow.
People won't even pay for the fuel costs of supersonic airliners, a proven technology with many decades of experience. The chances of this becoming a viable method of transportation is practically 0.
This is useless for space launch. At any altitude where there is enough oxygen to use as oxidizer there is enough air for massive drag and heating load. Launch vehicles want to get above the air as quickly as possible and then get to the serious business of accelerating to orbital velocity.
The only thing this is really good for is missiles with a less predictable trajectory than a ballistic missile that can change course and evade anti-ballistic interceptors.
Any claIms that that hypersonic air breathing technology has anything to do with rapid air travel to Japan or easy access to a vacation in space is PR in order to ensure popular support and budgets for a military project.
Business class is coach with an extra half an inch of armrest per seat, an extra inch of legroom, and a slightly better inflight snack... walnuts instead of peanuts.
And for these privileges you pay an extra 800 - 1000 % of a coach ticket, but you get to feel slightly more special than the slightly less special, unwashed masses stinking up the back 2/3 of the plane behind you.
Since 1983, most airlines, (little known fact here,) most airlines have had air ducting that takes the air that it dispenses into coach class seating areas, from inlets that are built into the seats of the first class section, so the whole time you're back there, you're huffing farts from the assholes in first class.
Only people who have flown first class know this; it's part of why they are willing to pay so much for those seats. The privilege of knowing your farts are going straight into the noses and mouthes of all those "poors" who aren't as good as you. That and avoiding being one of the people huffing rich asshole farts.
Remember that next time you get on a plane.
Actually, scramjets are pretty exotic beasts. What you're thinking of are ramjets. The latter uses the inlet pike to direct an oblique shock wave to the inlet to compress incoming air without the need for a fan compressor, but the resulting flow at the combustion chamber is subsonic,with the flow aft of the chamber going back to supersonic. The former provides for combustion while the airflow through the engine is still supersonic - that's a bit of a tricky operation as combustion is very difficult to sustain. It's why there are no scramjets in commercial or regular military operation at the moment.
32 planes built, 12 of them lost, none due to enemy fire.
Without a powerful precooler this engine will have quite a substantial weight, decreasing its efficiency. The SABRE engine from Reaction Engines Ltd. seems to be more of a step in the right direction, instead of brute-forcing the minimum performance required, efficiency be damned.
But no such problem for a cruise missile... And given that the tests are being conducted by the military I am not sure what all the talk about civilian use comes from.
The airline industry has long ago decided that the speeds attained 50 years ago, and have been focusing on efficiency. Which is good, for that opened up air travel to the masses. In the last 20 years they have just focused on cutting corners, for the sake of their bottom line, which is (very) bad for travelers. We need this new technology, and we need at reasonable prices.
The space shuttle is an aircraft that flew hundreds of times in excess of mach 25 using 1960/70s technology.
For definitions of "aircraft" that include bricks and meteorites, sure.
Did anyone else notice the confusion between oxygen (generically oxidizer) and fuel? Using oxygen from the atmosphere as the oxidizer to burn fuel does save the weight of carrying oxidizer, but does not eliminate the need to carry fuel.
What "lost" a number of SR-71s was the "coffin corner."
The faster planes go, the narrower the control of allowable angle of attack is to maintain attitude control. At take off speeds you have many degrees of angle of attack to use without loss of control.
At 2500 mph, the angle of attack allowable variance gets very small and the plane can only be safely flown in level flight in a straight line in non-turbulent weather.
"The first test of the rocket was conducted in 2009. The next test is scheduled for 2017 with the project expected to be completed in 2018. It's only a matter of time before such high-speed transportation technology is implemented into our infrastructure. Last week, Hyperloop One conducted a successful test of its high speed transportation technology in the desert outside Las Vegas." Not sure I really understand the comment. We already had supersonic flights that simply were not economically sustainable. Too few passengers and much higher aircraft and maintenance costs + limited airport access meant a failed business model. Maybe 30-40 years from now when the Hypersonic aircraft costs and airport construction allows greater access we could see commercial access to Hypersonic travel. For the near future, like others have stated I think more passengers would pay more for higher speed internet communications and more spacious comfortable seating options on standard flights. I'd say commercial Mach 5 flights will arrive about the same time as the flying cars.
2 space shuttles bit the dust.
Ah yes.
I used to work at the place you linked FFS but not in hypersonics.
The project has been ongoing for YEARS. I first saw a shock tunnel test there in 1987 (long before the 1997 mentioned in the link) and the project had been running for some time before then.
"He added that the scramjet was a supersonic combustion engine that uses oxygen from the atmosphere for fuel, making it lighter and faster than fuel-carrying rockets."
Oxygen is an oxidizer not fuel!
-Eric