Post by tangent on Nov 28, 2012 14:48:44 GMT
BBC report:
That's what I call a cooling unit, 1000°C to -140°C in 1/100th of a second.
The UK company developing an engine for a new type of spaceplane says it has successfully demonstrated the power unit's enabling technology.
Reaction Engines Ltd (REL) of Culham, Oxfordshire, ran a series of tests on key elements of its Sabre propulsion system under the independent eye of the European Space Agency (ESA). ESA's experts have confirmed that all the demonstration objectives were met. REL claims the major technical obstacle to its ideas has now been removed.
REL's idea is for an 84m-long vehicle called Skylon that would do the job of a big rocket but operate like an airliner, taking off and landing at a conventional runway. But its success depends on the Sabre engine's ability to manage the very hot air entering its intakes at high speed.
REL's solution is a module containing arrays of extremely fine piping that can extract the heat and plunge the inrushing air to minus 140°C in just 1/100th of a second. Ordinarily, the moisture in the air would be expected to freeze out rapidly, covering the piping in a blanket of frost and dislocating their operation. But the company's engineers have also devised a means to control the frosting, permitting the Sabre engine to run in jet mode for as long as is needed before making the transition to full rocket mode to take the Skylon spaceplane into orbit.
"With this now successfully demonstrated," says REL, "there are currently no technical reasons why the Sabre engine programme cannot move forward into the next stage of development."
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20510112
That's what I call a cooling unit, 1000°C to -140°C in 1/100th of a second.
