The issue of passenger jet speed is one that’s been around awhile. Since the Concorde program was apparently sabotaged (plenty of proof on that) the passenger jets have been limited to subsonic, meaning 10 or 12 hour flights across the ocean. Too long. Well, here’s some nice actual progress:
According to the South China Morning Post, Beijing is in the development phase of constructing a state of the art hypersonic engine facility to mass-produce, low-cost planes capable of traveling five times faster than the speed of sound.
“combined cycle engine” … at China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.
The manufacturing plant is set to be constructed in Hefei, China’s eastern Anhui province.
The Institute of Mechanics (Imech) is one of the largest hypersonic developers in China. The institute would “join hands” with the Hefei government to construct the engine manufacturing facility. The region of Hefei was chosen because of its growing reputation as a significant science and technology hub in China.
Beijing recently unleashed a new wave of capital flowing to technological breakthroughs. Fan Xuejun, director of Imech’s “scramjet” division, told the Post the manufacturing plant would make engines for military or civilian customers.
Hypersonic planes will be able to take dozens of people and tonnes of cargo … from Beijing to New York in about two hours versus a conventional commercial passenger plane that would normally take 15 hours.
The I-plane’s two layers of wings will mean it can handle significantly heavier payload than existing hypersonic vehicles. The hypersonic engine could be a blended engine, “a rocket-based combined cycle system. The system could use a conventional turbine engine for take-off and acceleration to supersonic speed – faster than the speed of sound – then fire up the scramjet to reach hypervelocity. A rocket would give the vehicle a final push to bring it up to orbital height.
The engine puts three different types of propulsion technology in one package. Russia, the United States, and China have “recently overcome the technical hurdles and achieved the long-term, stable operation of scramjet engines.”
“The rocket-based combined cycle system could be the first hypersonic power source” to be commercialized on a global scale.
Imech is not alone in the world of hypersonic technologies. There are at least five other major state-owned research companies or government entities possessing such technologies.
“In 2016, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp said it was developing a hybrid space plane that would take off and land in a normal airport with a combined cycle engine.
Its major rival, China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp launched a similar project called Teng Long, or soaring dragon, soon afterward.
The China Aerodynamics Research and Development Centre, the hypersonic weapon development branch of the People’s Liberation Army in Mianyang, Sichuan province, announced a successful test of a prototype spacecraft in the Gobi Desert, in Inner Mongolia. The vehicle was believed to be a hypersonic space plane. “
Each Chinese company in the hypersonic race “has a unique a new generation of Chinese commercial and tourist space endeavors are looking to compete technological advantage,” Hong said.
“In the end I believe the government will scoop the cream of the technology of each project and put them together to build a high-performance vehicle,” he said.
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YVR to China in under 2 hours. Nice ….
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Quotes:
…. Supersonic combustion ramjet engines, known as scramjets, can burn hydrogen fuel and oxygen from the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds — above Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, far beyond the speeds possible with ordinary jet engines. In 2011, an experimental scramjet developed by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) reached Mach 20 — about 13,000 mph, or 20,900 km/h …. link
….. Imagine a 10-seater private jet that uses rocket boosters to take off, detaches these at an altitude of 12km, fires its supersonic engines to hit speeds of Mach 24 (20,000 km/h), and gets you from New York to London in 11 minutes …
….. A Canadian engineer has come up with a new concept for a four-winged scramjet that could carry 75 passengers at speeds of up to Mach 10 – which is 10 times the speed of sound and five times faster than Concorde. That means the proposed Skreemr jet could cross the Atlantic in just half an hour…
….. Scramjets are designed to operate in the hypersonic flight regime, beyond the reach of turbojet engines, and, along with ramjets, fill the gap between the high efficiency of turbojets and the high speed of rocket engines….
…. Airbus has patented a jet that will travel at speeds of up to Mach 4.5 – four and a half times the speed of sound – using three different types of engines. Two turbojets enable the aircraft to make a vertical take-off and reach the speed of sound, before retracting into a compartment in the plane.. link . then a rocket engine then guides the aircraft up to an altitude of more than 100,000ft, and then the rocket engine retracts and two wing-mounted ramjets propel the plane up to Mach 4.5…..
….. China is home to two companies reaching for the hypersonic prize, the Chinese Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and the Chinese Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC)…..
….. a new generation of Chinese commercial and tourist space endeavors are looking to compete in galactic business … One is Expace. Founded in February, the firm will be the lead tenant of China’s first commercial space industrial park in Wuhan, China. It has already signed up over 10 launches for its solid fueled Kuaizhou Rockets…..
…… Ramjets are a special kind of jet engine that work best for sustained supersonic cruise. Unlike other jet engines, they compress incoming air not with a compressor stage in the engine’s core, but by squeezing it around a cone-shaped spike. The compressed air is then injected with fuel and the mixture is ignited, producing tremendous thrust which is then expelled through the nozzle in the rear. …….
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