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MACH 30 WIND TUNNEL to ‘put China decades’ ahead in hypersonic race
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Leading researcher reveals new facility capable of simulating flight at 30 times the speed of sound will be ready ‘soon’
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Power produced by the JF-22 will be seven times more than the Hoover Dam in the US, almost as much as Three Gorges
By Stephen Chen in Beijing | The South China Morning Post
Published: 31 May, 2021
A Chinese physicist has said that a new wind tunnel in Beijing to be unveiled “soon” will put China decades ahead of the rest of the world in hypersonic technology.
Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher HAN Guilai told an online lecture last week that the
JF-22 wind tunnel, in Beijing’s Huairou district, was capable of simulating flights at
up to 10 kilometers per second – 30 times the speed of sound. Together with an existing facility, also in Beijing, it would put China
“about 20 to 30 years ahead” of the West.
Han, from China’s top hypersonic research agency the INSTITUTE OF MECHANICS, said the surface of an aeroplane travelling at such a speed
could reach 10,000 degrees Celsius (18,032 Fahrenheit) – hot enough to break air molecules into atoms, even giving some of them an electric charge.
“This air is no longer the air we breathe in,” said Han.
“The flying vehicle we study is like swimming in mud.”
Han said the
power produced by the JF-22 wind tunnel would reach 15 gigawatts – nearly 70 per cent of the installed capacity of the world’s largest hydropower station Three Gorges Dam in China’s central Hubei province, or more than seven times the Hoover Dam in Nevada.
Chinese hypersonic test flights have recorded unusually high success rates, with no reported crashes. In 2019, Chinese space authorities conducted a secret experiment of what is believed to be a
prototype space plane that can take off or land at an ordinary airport. Researchers have also revealed details, in domestic scientific journals, of
hypersonic engine designs unseen anywhere else in the world.
Part of China’s success in hypersonics is because of the unique technology used in its wind tunnels. Unlike facilities in other countries – which use mechanical compressors to generate high-speed air flow –
the JF-22 uses chemical explosions.
When the tunnel fires up, its fuel
burns at a speed 100 million times faster than a gas stove, generating shock waves similar to those encountered by air planes at hypervelocity in high altitudes. According to Han,
each plane or weapon model “needs to take about 10,000 TESTS in the tunnel” before production.
LENS II, the most advanced wind tunnel in the US, has simulated flights up to Mach 7, with the simulation lasting 30 milliseconds. In contrast, the JF-22’s average runtime could reach 130 milliseconds, with a much higher top speed, Han said.
QIAN XUESEN, father of China’s rocket programme, coined the term “hypersonic” in a 1946 paper after he discovered that the behaviour of air flow followed completely different rules at five times faster than sound.
While the
launch date of the JF-22 Wind Tunnel remains classified, it will work together with the JF-12, an older tunnel with about a fifth of the power output, to simulate flight conditions at both higher and lower altitudes where air densities were quite different, according to the researcher.
“There is a Chinese saying, it takes 10 years to sharpen a sword,” Han said.
“We have spent 60 years sharpening two swords. And they are the best.”
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post PRINT EDITION as: Big Leap In High-Speed Simulation Of Flights
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NOTE:
The relationship between Qian Xuesen and the Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (or abbreviated as IMCAS)
Qian Xuesen, Hsue-Shen Tsien
(1911.12.11--2009.10.31)
Scientist of Applied Mechanics and System Engineering & Systematology; A native of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province; Graduated from Jiaotong University in 1934; Received PhD Degree in Aeronautics & Mathematics from California Institute of Technology, USA in 1939; Research Professor of Science & Technology Committee for General Armament Department.
[Also a
co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), joined Theodore von Kármán's group at the Caltech's Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories; and involved in the Pentagon's famous “
Operation Paperclip” to question Nazi German scientists, including
Wernher von Braun, the
future father of the United States rocketry and space exploration program.]
Returned to China from abroad in 1955; One of the main founders of IMCAS and first Director of IMCAS from January 1956 to February 1984; Elected as Member (Academician) of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1957 and Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1994.
The
“Two Swords” mentioned by Han Guilai, a 4th-generation researcher the Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, may possibly refer to the Long March rocket (or Changzheng CZ) and Dongfeng missile (DF), both programs were pioneered by Qian Xuesen and his teams.
The above article on China's newly built hypersonic wind tunnel, JF-22, is also cross-posted at the UK news media, The Sun:
HYPERSPEED China unveils plan for 23,000mph (37,000kph) hypersonic wind tunnel which will put Beijing ‘30 years ahead’ of the West (31 May 2021)
The hypersonic wind tunnel technology is also hugely important when it comes to weapons.
President Xi Jinping has made modernising the armed forces a key priority and wants to have a “world class military”. China has invested a huge amount of time and money developing hypersonic missiles.
The DF-17 can perform “extreme manoeuvers” as it hurtles at Mach 10 - some 7,600 mph (12,231 kph) - towards a target, with any warship unlikely to survive a direct hit.
The missile comprises of a rocket with flies to around 25 miles (40 kilometres) above the earth and then launches a Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) armed with a warhead at a target.
Mach 30 ‘tunnel’ will put China decades ahead (02 JUNE 2021)
By DAVE MAKICHUK | ASIA TIMES
Many shock tunnels have been built around the world.
For example, LENS I and II in the US, the High-Enthalpy Shock Tunnel (HIEST) in Japan, the High-Enthalpy Shock Tunnel (HEG) in Germany and the JF-12 and JF-22 tunnels in China.
As well as his work on hypersonics,
it was Qian Xuesen who single-handedly led China’s space and military rocketry efforts after he was drummed out of the United States during the red-baiting of the McCarthy era.
A former US Secretary of the Navy, Dan Kimball — later head of the rocket propulsion company, Aerojet — would later say it was
“the stupidest thing this country ever did.”
But in the US of the 1930s and 1940s, Qian was no less valuable, if not so publicly celebrated, as a pioneer in American jet and rocket technology.
As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later as a scientist and teacher at the California Institute of Technology,
Qian Xuesen, also known as Tsien Hsue-shen, played a central role in early US efforts to exploit jet and rocket propulsion.
On the war front in Germany, he advised the US Army on ballistic-missile guidance technology.
At the war’s end, holding the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, he debriefed Nazi scientists, including
Werner von Braun, and was sent to analyze Hitler’s V-2 rocket facilities.
In 1955, Qian was sent back to China [in prisoner exchange with the many US pilots detained by China during the Korean War], where he was proclaimed a hero and immediately put to work developing Chinese rocketry.
Under his leadership, China developed its first generation of “Long March” rockets and, in 1970, launched its first satellite.
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