[ExI] Skylon- a plane that can fly anywhere in under four hours!

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf
Of BillK

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 5:31 PM, spike wrote:
>>... John I am not going to get too excited by this until I see that they 
> can make that precooler perform the way they say it will...
> If the Brits get it to work, then I will offer a Jolly good show, chaps,
jolly good... spike

>...I would love this to actually work and be built, but I am dubious at
present...BillK
_______________________________________________


Ja me too on both BillK.  If you British guys make a heat exchanger work way
out in a regime where there are speeds waaay out beyond where the usual
models were derived, , turbulence, nonlinearities up the kazoo, shock waves
all over the place, well then my hat is off to you.  I don't even have a
hat, so I would need to get one and take it off.  

If my understanding of a Brayton cycle is even anywhere close to right, this
whole scheme depends on precooling the air flow after it has already passed
thru one heeellllll of an oblique shock wave, in order to compress it
sufficiently to combust in time (before it is spewed out the nozzles.)  But
with that big of a shock wave, you have plasma taking away energy and
interfering with combustion, you have all kinds of nonlinearities that are
known, never mind all the weird stuff that shock waves do, such as Mach
diamonds, which are said to be caused by shock waves bouncing off of each
other:

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--zvIqmCkw--/c_fit,fl_prog
ressive,q_80,w_636/17wf5vvh2sobzjpg.jpg

http://www.wvi.com/~sr71webmaster/sr71engb.jpg

Is that cool or what?

spike