Supersonic Concept Plane Would Shush Sonic Booms

A new design concept for a futuristic faster-than-sound aircraft could break through legal barriers to supersonic flights over land by shushing the sonic booms created by such vehicles.

The concept aircraft, envisioned by aerospace company Lockheed Martin, would revolutionize supersonic cruising by relying upon a so-called "inverted-V" engine-under wing configuration, where the engines sit atop the wings rather than beneath, NASA officials said in a statement.
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Scramjet - Next Generation Planes

A scramjet (also known as supersonic combustion ramjet) represents a variation of ramjet using supersonic combustion. Just like the ramjet, the scramjet has a constricted tube and the air is compressed using a high speed. There is also a combustion chamber with fuel that gets combusted. Also, the nozzle exhausts the jet leave at a very high speed, much higher than the inlet air.

The commercial engines of aircrafts use the compressor to take the air and squeeze it into the engine and then spray that fuel into the air. After that ignition starts. In this case the great thing is that very few parts are needed for the whole process. There is no need to a high speed turbine like the one used in turbojets. There is a minimum functional speed required. Also, the scramjet needs supersonic airflow to pass through the big engine. There are also much recent models that use booster rockets to get the velocity.

There have also been made some projections on the top speed and that can reach Mach 24.

Right now the USA Air Force has the SR-71 Blackbird, that can reach close to Mach 3.4. Also, the rockets used on the Apollo Program reached Mach 30+.

Also, it is important to know that the scramjets have complexity and weight issues. This is why few suborbital tests with scramjets have been done. This is because no flown scramjet has survived an actual flight test. Many of the needed parameters are still unclear and the research is taking a long time.

This led to many claims from both of the sides working on this. Pioneers like Jim Oberg and Henry Spencer have named orbital scramjets "one of the hardest manners to reach the orbit", or they used the term 'scramjets' to refer to the applications.

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X-51A Races To Hypersonic Record

The Boeing X-51 is an unmanned scramjet demonstration aircraft for hypersonic (Mach 6, approx. 4,000 mph or 6,400 km/h at altitude) flight testing. The X-51 WaveRider program is run as a cooperative effort of the United States Air Force, DARPA, NASA, Boeing and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. The program is managed by the Propulsion Directorate within the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).[2] The X-51 had its first captive flight attached to a B-52 in December 2009. The test vehicle successfully completed its first free-flight on Wednesday.

Scramjet - History Of Scramjet

In the World War II and afterwards, there was a lot of effort put in research and most of all directed towards high speed jets and rocket aircrafts.

Bell X-1 was the first accomplishment, as it reached a supersonic flight in 1947. Rapid progress followed. In the 1950's and also the 1960's, many experimental scramjets were made and then tested in UK and USA. Tests were also made in Australia in 1981, guided by Prof. Ray Stalker, at T3, ANU.

Back then the main purpose of the civilian air transportation was to reduce the operating cost and not increase the flight speed. The supersonic flights needed jet engines that were conventional but used a lot of fuel. This is why the companies preferred the supersonic jumbo jet and not the transports. Tupolev Tu-144 and Concorde were famous and they were sustained by the Russian and the French governments. They had little profit and they received subventions from the state.

The supersonic capabilities could not be used in military aircrafts because of the high speed and the temperature of the supersonic flight.

From 1986 to 1993, in US there have been attempts to create a reusable space plane but without results. The hypersonic flight concept was not well taken and dropped off.

Right now there are different claims on who made the first scramjet word. And by work it means: the scramjet worked on grown tests and in the wind tunnel, plus a minor flight test. Right now the problem is complicated and many experiments are kept a secret.

There are many institutions involved like the American Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the Australian Defence Science or the Technology Organization (DSTO). They have successfully tested a scramjet using rockets to boost it. They did the test in Australia. Besides the experiment, no scramjet was ever built.

Read more about scramjets and Ramjets, visit www.Scramjet.info

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