The Chinese are testing a jet engine for flights "anywhere in the world in 2 hours" (2 photos)

Chinese scientists have proven that they can masternot only the Moon and descend to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but also solve commercial problems that can change the future of civil and military aviation. Developers at the Institute of Mechanics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have reported the first successful testing of a "canted detonation ramjet," or Sodramjet for short.

In theory, Sodramjet class engines will allowAfter a horizontal start, airplanes reach speeds of up to Mach 16 and, after reaching the upper layers of the stratosphere, reach any point on the Earth in just two hours. The first test of a prototype engine in a wind tunnel showed a unique result of Mach 9, which is slightly more than half of the theoretical speed of the future engine.

The futuristic engine has a relativelysimple construction. It consists of three main components with no moving parts: a single-stage air intake, a hydrogen fuel injector, and a combustion chamber. The throat of the chamber opens towards the upper end of the air intake.

The main advantage of Sodramjet overtraditional engines of the scramjet (hypersonic ramjet engine) class, there is no need to take tanks with oxygen on board the aircraft, which comes from the surrounding atmosphere.
In the 1960s and 1970s, NASA collided with the seriesfailures in his experiments with the scramjet, which had no moving parts and was predicted to perform better than conventional jet engines at hypersonic speeds, but it often malfunctioned during operation. One reason was that the shock waves created by the high-velocity air could instantly extinguish the flames. The Chinese solved this problem by forcing the shock waves to work in conjunction with the combustion chamber, supplying oxygen to it at hypersonic speeds.

During the Chinese experiment, the installation can beit would be to accelerate to an even higher speed, but then the wind tunnel itself would not withstand the load. The world's first wind tunnel capable of simulating Mach 16 is still under construction in Beijing.
Video footage provided by the research team shows that when the engine started up, the throat of the combustion chamber lit up like a Star Wars spacecraft.

The introduction of Sodramjet technology will reducedimensions and mass of the scramjet engine, which will make a reality trip to the other end of the globe in two hours. However, the actual use of the Sodramjet scramjet is still a matter of the distant future, and the experiment carried out only proves the efficiency of the technology necessary for conducting hypersonic flights in the future.

Source: scmp