Beware break failure.
Cornwall, Devon and half of Somerset.
The 1,000mph (1,609 kmph) Bloodhound supersonic car is undergoing its first test runs at Newquay Airport in Cornwall later today. Whizzing up and down the 2,744-metre runway, the Bloodhound car is planned to reach speeds of up to 200mph (322kmph). The car, built in Bristol over the last eight years by a group of enthusiastic …
Cosworth designed Formula Junior, F3 and F2 engines for a period before the DFV engine which became the heart of 3 litre Formula One in the 1970s. USA independents, VPJ, suggested to Cosworth that a 2.8 litre turbocharged DFV might work. Cosworth responded that the engine required fuel at a rate greater than an English bath tap. The DFX worked.
He was right to mention the 263. The Me163 didn't have wheels. The Me263 was a 163 with wheels. Never got past the prototype stage but would probably have been a more effective fighter and certainly less lethal to its own pilots than the 163 was, since it had a tendency to explode on landing.
Is there some useful scientific stuff here that I don't get? I'm all for the challenge for it's own sake but typically these things feed into more efficient planes/cars/engines whereas in this case I'm not sure if it's the case? Are there areas it advances our understanding I'm not seeing? If they succeed, do we then aim for a 1500mph car or will people get bored if there are no applications to "strap a jet on the back of a car"?
The bloke behind it recons that 1000mph is about the fastest you can go on land "without science getting in the way".
I was surprised when I saw the headline elsewhere - 200mph? My car's limited to 155, so 200 can't be the record. Then I realised they were going for a 200mph potter about, which is quite mental.
From http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/project
"The BLOODHOUND Project is a global Engineering Adventure, using a 1,000mph World Land Speed Record attempt to inspire the next generation to enjoy, explore and get involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics."
Go and see one of their presentations. They are bloody brilliant.
So, the answer is... no... there is no why. They simply justify it as being cool.
I’m like the guy who asked... I think it sounds nifty. It was have been much cooler if there was an application. Of course, I believe that the “before science gets in the way” argument is crap. To suggest that :
A) Getting to 1000MPH doesn’t require piles of science is silly. There is propolsion, aerodynamics, chemistry, etc... involved here already. This project wouldn’t stand a chance without tons of science.
B) 1000MPH is a ridiculous arbitrary number. If this were ancient Egypt, we’d claim an arbitrary number of cubits, elsewhere leagues, in civilization kilometers, etc... 1000MPH is of no particular scientific or engineering significance. Has any physicist ever calculated that 1000MPH is when an object must leave the ground? Did we decide a mile should be one thousandth of a magic number that is when things can’t be on the ground?
All this really did was prove that you can lay a rocket on its side and with the right structure and right shape, it would stick to the ground and hopefully go straight.
Oh... let’s not forget that it glorifies insane amounts of waste. I am generally horrified by stuff like this.
Now, a 1000MPH electric maglev or 1000MPH fuel cell powered EM pulse engine... that would be cool. But glorifying a sideways metal phalice with incredible thrust that ejects massive amounts of liquid while pushing so hard it bypasses friction that once depleted causes it to sputter out and become limp... I must admit these guys... brilliant or not are more than a little scary.
The actual quote (from the Telegraph) was:
The rocket engineer explained that the 1,000 mph target came about after he calculated that it was the " physical limit you can reach on land" before "science becomes a barrier".
I assume it's not bang on 1000mph, but around there. Obviously getting to that speed requires a lot of sciencing, but I think his point was that if you go much faster everything goes skewiff
eg: is it even possible to design wheels that can take the temperature caused by air friction at those speeds?
A waste? Come off it.
"The rocket engineer explained that the 1,000 mph target came about after he calculated that it was the " 'hysical limit you can reach on land" before "science becomes a barrier".'
Andy Green explaiend this on the R4 Today program this morning ... the calculations indicated that at around 1000mph thinbgs start to get a lot more complicated so "we aim to build a 1000mph car" seemed like a good publicity target for the project ... some how I think "we aim to build a car that should be able to reach 983.6mph and possibly a few mph higher"
"It's not air friction, it's rotational stresses and vibrations caused by track surface irregularities. They tend to the extreme at those speeds."
Don't forget the top of the wheel will be travelling at twice the speed of the car (while the part in contact with the ground will be at zero velocity). Air friction at 2000mph would be significant I think, although you're right about the extreme stresses.
> 1000MPH is a ridiculous arbitrary number. If this were ancient Egypt, we’d claim an arbitrary number of cubits, elsewhere leagues, in civilization kilometers, etc... 1000MPH is of no particular scientific or engineering significance.
You must be fun at parties.
I'll grant you that many cultures throughout history would have no concept of how fast 1000MPH is, but it is easy enough to convert it to the globally and time understood 0.0149% of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum.
Lets put it this way - sicen the Rocket car Challenge hit schools, takeup of STEM subjects has rocketed and is an unqualified success.
In the 60's the Apollo programme drove takeup.
70's and early 80's it was the Space Shuttle.
Since then, nothing. Just a decline as kids had nothing to inspire them.
Bloodhound has turned that around.
Sorry, but most of your post while well intentioned is ignorant BS. If you truly are 'horrified' then you really are a snowflake.
Go and see one of their presentations. They are bloody brilliant.
And and inspiration for the younger generation, as is this chap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKHz7wOjb9w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsXWspo5hrc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1EHZPjLNHk
Scale up the goal (and the budget) and you have Bloodhound.
I hope Colin Furze was invited along for the event
Primarily, it's a recruiting tool for UK mechanical engineering: it's one of those "catch the imagination" things that gets kids to think "I wanna do that when I grow up", get them into the field at large. There's also an advertising effect for UK engineering at large.
We also learn stuff that might come in handy if down the line in other applications: think about the stresses the 'airframe', the wheels, even the bearings are under: some of that will come up elsewhere (Say, if the Hyperloop turns out to be a real thing, or we ever get around to building any sort of Launch Assist thing like an orbital elevator or a launch loop).
But that's a distraction. Really, this is a "engineering is awesome" piece that promotes the sponsors, gets attention on UK engineering, and prods kids towards a career in engineering.
The education aspect was a key part of the plan as a hook to get public funding and support.
The team would have done it purely for the challenge anyway (like climbing a mountain, "it was there") but they clearly enjoy that it's helping encourage children into STEM education, and pushing schools into teaching younger children at a more advanced level than before.
I think the (very real) engineering challenge was to create a super-sonic land vehicle. All previous supersonic vehicles have been firmly in the air. Solving engineering challenges like that almost always have knock-on effects in terms of general increase in understanding of physics.
However, since that was achieved with Thrust SSC, I'm not sure exactly what science will be advanced by this incremental speed increase.
Bloody exciting though, I'll give them that!
JDX,
look matey boy (I assume you are a chap), it's not that complicated, because this research thing can inspire all kind of whizzy progress and new ideas.
My fabby spouse and some esteemed colleagues did some physics-y research a while ago[!], and do you know what came out of the other end? - modern radiotherapy treatment.
So why don't you try a bit of imagination, you never know where it might take you...
Anon as she doesn't like publicity, which I think is very Britishly modest eh?
Knowing us El reg folk we could probably argue about the definition of a car all day, but yes, something like that.
I'm just not sure you can squeeze something like this into any sort of definition of "car" that would be accepted by most people.
Amazingly cool, never been a car.
"Knowing us El reg folk we could probably argue about the definition of a car all day"
If its a car then ElReg readers should be able to reference it in some "tedious^h^h^h^h^h^hamusing" example of why linux/osx/android/ios/windows is better than windows/linux/osx/android/ios
"I'm not sure exactly how one defines a "car" but i'm sure things like this fall outside of every definition."
I'm fairly sure that Green, Noble et al will have checked with Guinness, the FIM and other record-awarding bodies what their definition of "car" is.
The land-speed record hasn't been held by a wheel-driven vehicle since the 1960s.
'What is the current record for a wheel-driven vehicle?'
If only there was some way of searching a massive cross-section of the world's knowledge base to find out. I think the first person to come up with a way of doing that could make a fortune.
In the meantime I'd guess at about 439MPH.
:I think the first person to come up with a way of doing that could make a fortune
Not sure about that, sounds complicated, I think it will take four or five attempts before it works properly.
===
That kind of instability will likely be an additional non-essential part of normal operating capacity... I think we should call it something now to help identify it.
Lets call it Java.
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"Car, noun - a self-propelled road vehicle designed to carry passengers"
Really? So what's the word that describes single-seater racing vehicles then? I always thought it was "car, however on your definition they fail on two counts; they're not road vehicles and they're not designed to carry passengers...
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I don't think they are aiming a the car speed record, but land-speed record, which I guess means any vehicle that has one or more wheels in touch with the earth, driven by the wheels or pushed by a rocket / jet engine. Even Malcolm Campbell's 'Blue bird' from the 1930's wouldn't be considered a normal car.
Amazing, in under 20 words you managed to spell "by" incorrectly two times*, but nailed it once!
* Or maybe you have volunteers, and you, er, "designed" them. I suppose you can count children as (usually unwilling) designed volunteers. Looking at many kids, I think their parents might have been drunk whilst designing them but I digress
Let's face it, the pilot is not really going to be in control in any meaningful sense. And that brings up a point: there are a lot of ideas - powered fighting suits etc. - that put a human being in a situation where you find that a lot of dead weight is there to protect the occupant. The thing would function better if you took the human and all the associated paraphernalia out, operating the thing remotely instead, or even running it automatically. This is why drones are becoming so "popular" with the military - fly them to the limit of machine endurance, not human, and eliminate all those safety features that add weight and reduce range etc.
I've had a quick look, but cant find the answer : Why Bloodhound? I'm not a massive expert on doggies, but Bloodhounds and renown for the sniffing, rather than their speed. Perhaps 'Greyhound' might have had American Bus connotations, so not using that is understandable. How about calling it 'Mick the Miller'? Or perhaps Whippet?
Off a cliff and with rocket assistance, maybe. But you'd need a very tall cliff, or lots of rockets.
Also, to qualify for these speed records, the same vehicle is required to perform the journey in reverse within an hour. It's possible this may present a few problems for your Corolla...
I suggest you get sponsorship from a manufacturer of Gaffer tape. That'll fix anything.
"Also, to qualify for these speed records, the same vehicle is required to perform the journey in reverse within an hour."
I think you mean in the opposite direction on the same course. Given the aerodynamics necessary, trying it "in reverse" would probably be entertaining but not productive.
Given the aerodynamics necessary, trying it "in reverse" would probably be entertaining but not productive.
In the late 1970's there was a Dutch TV programme with the 'racing in reverse' theme. Given the abundance of cheap, to-be-scrapped, Daf cars[0] back then, there was ample fodder for those races. Some of them are on YouTube ("achteruitrij race"), so you can judge the 'entertaining' bit for yourself.
[0] with their jarretelle drive[1] they could theoretically go as fast in reverse as forward. It's just that steering behaviour spoils things a bit, unless you don't care much for rolling your car.
[1] Variomatic, officially.
ThrustSSC used rear-wheel steering for aerodynamic reasons, it worked but it caused a few problems. Andy Green had to drive while inputting two different steering movement frequencies (fast and slow) and also deal with the need to steer in reverse to begin a correction and then reverse the input again.
Andy Green is quite simply an amazing bloke, naturally he has the ability to think ahead of the car because that's what flying fast jets does for you.
"Also, to qualify for these speed records, the same vehicle is required to perform the journey in reverse within an hour. It's possible this may present a few problems for your Corolla..."
I suggest that it might be slightly more plausible for a Toyota Corolla to reverse back up a cliff than that thing to do 200 mph backwards. That'd be some draft deflector!
The purpose of Bloodhound is to push the boundaries of what is possible and is known.
In other words - Why do it? Because we can't (yet).
For example - we know that we can fly aircraft at very high speeds but the air kind of gets out of the way. What happens to soil at when something is running over it at 1000mph? No one knows whether the shockwave from the supersonic air will pulverise the ground or not because no one has done it before.
How do you create wheels of the necessary size that rotate that fast without them disintegrating from centripetal forces? This will have applications in other machines.
ThrustSSC created a shockwave that pulverised the surface of the Black Rock desert in Nevada, it was one of the reasons why they stopped after getting past Mach 1, the wheels were rotating much more slowly than they should have been and the structure of the car was being pounded by the supersonic flow and the acoustic energy from the RR Speys at close range. Some of the team wanted to put in the more powerful Spey 205 engines but it was decided that the risks were getting larger and it didn't make sense to ruin the very good safety record that had been built up.
BloodhoundSSC is a much different design, whereas ThrustSSC had a flat bottom across quite a broad part of the fuselage the newer car has less of itself close to the ground giving more space for the shockwaves to dissipate.
There was a brilliant build thread started by one of the lead engineers on Pistonheads... Unfortunately photobucket has gobbled all the glorious photos describing in detail all the bits that were created to build it..
https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=23&t=1352985&i=0
Particularly the bit where they ran the numbers for Thrust 2 through a CFD (fluid dynamics computer) in later years, not available at the time, and found that not only were Ron Ayers' figures spot on, but if it had gone even slightly faster than the 633mph (?) it got up to, it would have taken off upwards. At something like 45G.
Which is why they do everything in small steps.....
Thrust 2 reached a peak speed of slightly under 651mph, as you say the CFD predicted that the car would have flipped if it had gone 6mph faster which is lucky because before the record run they had cranked up the front suspension by literally thousandths of an inch to get a higher peak speed.
ThrustSSC learned from this, they had a Martin-Baker rocket pack installed inverted ahead of the cockpit. If the front wheel loads had dropped below a pre-set value then the rockets would have fired to use 4,000lb of thrust to keep the nose down, followed by jacking up the tail suspension and releasing the brake parachutes to abort the run. When you hear the "armed" and "safe" calls on the radio these refer to the arming switch for the abort system which includes the rocket pack.