GatewayRedbirds.com

The Experimental Engine That Could Get Us Anywhere in the World in 2 Hours

A Chinese-made "sodramjet" engine has reached nine times the speed of sound in a wind tunnel test. The engine could power an aircraft to reach anywhere in the world within two hours, the makers say.

Scientists say the sodramjet (short for “standing oblique detonation ramjet engine”) could be the first real hope for hypersonic flight—many times the speed of sound, and something that would bring both global travel and space travel much closer to home. "With reusable trans-atmospheric planes, we can take off horizontally from an airport runway, accelerate into orbit around the Earth, then reenter into the atmosphere, and finally land at an airport," the scientists, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Mechanics, write in a new study published in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics. "In this way, space access will become reliable, routine and affordable."

The idea is a decades-old theoretical variation on a scramjet, itself a variation on the ramjet, building on generations of work on high-speed flight. The sodramjet is the latest bleeding edge of a completely different use case. The ramjet led to the scramjet, which was designed to go as much as 15 times the speed of sound. Like the fastest combustion and even rocket cars, the secret is in dropping a great deal of weight from the craft—the scramjet scoops up oxygen from the air instead of in condensed form from a tank.

But that means a more fragile cycle of combustion that, it turns out, can be woofed out by the very sonic boom the engine creates. The scramjet just never reached its full potential. The key difference in the sodramjet is that the new design uses the sonic boom to add combustion, not blow it out.

South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports that the sodramjet follows decades of work on scramjets that began in the United States. But in China, development of scramjet concepts has continued, too. Even so, lead researcher Jiang Zonglin grew frustrated with scramjets and decided to go his own way, based on a theory published by NASA in 1980.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/experime ... 00666.html

mikechamp wrote: ↑

December 2 20, 11:07 am

The key difference in the sodramjet is that the new design uses the sonic boom to add combustion, not blow it out.

Popeye_Card wrote: ↑

December 2 20, 2:01 pm

It feels like I would hear 2-3 sonic booms each year as a child. I don't think I've heard one now since high school. Seems really odd in hindsight.

The cracking sound a bullwhip makes when properly wielded is, in fact, a small sonic boom. The end of the whip, known as the "cracker", moves faster than the speed of sound, thus creating a sonic boom.[2]

A bullwhip tapers down from the handle section to the cracker. The cracker has much less mass than the handle section. When the whip is sharply swung, the energy is transferred down the length of the tapering whip. Goriely and McMillen showed that the physical explanation is complex, involving the way that a loop travels down a tapered filament under tension.[10]

AWvsCBsteeeerike3 wrote: ↑

December 2 20, 2:21 pm

A quick google search shows they've been outlawed by the FAA over the mainland since 1973. As such my guess would be the military was responsible for them and due to public annoyance and UFO technology they fleeced off the aliens have found ways of avoiding them.