hypermach.com hmmmmm

Plane Trouble

Plane Trouble

Well-Known Member
I dunno if you guys have seen this yet, but it was actually featured in this months issue of AOPA.

http://hypermach.com/

It's a company trying to produce a Mach 4 hypersonic biz jet. Pretty outlandishly far fetched if one was to ask me. If you watch the YouTube vid featuring Richard Lugg, found and CEO, you'll notice him talking about sonic boom reduction using "Electromagnetic Drag Reduction Technology" whereby some form of electromagnetic vacuum is projected in front of the aircraft that it will then presumably pass through...

Does somebody want to explain me how such a thing is supposed to actually work in reality???? In the mean time I'm gonna run do some touch and goes I'm my TIE Fighter...
 
I think I'd work on the marketing a little:

The dream? Just imagine: Jetting out of London at 9am and arriving in LA in time for breakfast.
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Technically, if you leave London at 0900, you'll arrive in Los Angeles about lunchtime as it is now.

How much more would you like to spend to save a couple of hours? :) Besides, Einstein Bagels will serve you breakfast at noon!
 
9980ft to clear a 50' obstacle. You're going to be somewhat limited in airports for corporate purposes.
I wonder what the approach speed on something like that would be... 200kts?
 
Probably, I think the Concord's approach was about 210. But what I don't understand is how you can "project" an "electromagnetic vacuum" in front of the aircraft for it to pass through.... That's mind boggling.
 
Just going all sci-Di, I imagine it's like those supercavitating torpedoes, but changing the mechanical properties of the air around it instead of water.

Which seems like it would require a metric poop-ton of energy.
 
The "electromagnetic vacuum" is kindof like a deflector shield, no really, hear this out. Think of the fanless dyson fan. It ionizes air, then uses magnetics to move the ionized field. In their case, to make you cooler (pun intended, since spending hundreds on a fan has to have an alternative motive).

Basically you have your pitot tube like device out front which has an extremely high charge that must be dispersed to the air. That air becomes charged and then you refine the movement of the air by charging the fuselage to repel the air at certain points creating high density areas around the airframe but not on it. Basically creating a lot of smaller pockets of dense air where it would normally be caused by the sonic wavefront. Would this cause a boom? I have no idea, still compressing air, but at different points and not in a way that necessarily create a boom. You would also have to have an opposite charge on the tail to recombine the air over enough distance to not create a vacuum pop.

The other obvious problem is you have changed the volume of air available for both the engine and wing. So you have to change the approaching air enough to dissipate any boom, but still have enough for sufficient lift and thrust. You could also change it to "drag" air with you creating subsonic flow over the engine and wing and make the air supersonic to conserve mass above you. Creating a boom above, and not necessarily below.

If it all works, would really change the way we fly. Imagine attaching a few electromagnets to the aircraft and decreasing drag by 50%. Increased speed, decreased fuel burn. I wonder what would happen to aircraft design. Say the magnets fail? How would you deal with that. Is the aircraft required to have them working, as now you don't have enough thrust or lift to stay airborne with the new drag? What about this jet, if the system were to fail at Mach 4, is the fuselage strong enough to withstand the forces until it slows to subsonic?
 
Reading a little more they talk about active plasma flow sonic boom reduction technology. You could actually accelerate the production of plasma and compress it further than a traditional sonic boom with use of high energy magnetics. The problem would be decompressing it, as if left unattended, would make for a large explosion.

Caution, wake explosions. Follow no closer than 15 miles in trail.
 
mshunter said:
Yeah, right..........
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Look at some of the specs.... they plan on using JP4? As in SR71 fuel? Where are you going to get that?

With a 10k ft takeoff roll, you're going to need something like 17000ft to legally take off I bet. Lemme go check a list of all the 15k+ ft runways in the country....... lets see. Edwards lake bed..... and white sands. I Guess you can go to and from those.
 
JP4 isn't SR-71 fuel, it's just another type of jet fuel the military used before switiching to using primarily JP8 nowadays. Also known as Jet B. JP7 is SR71 fuel.
 
No worries. Caught my attention 'cause I flew some of the 135s that were modified to carry JP7 in some of the tanks when we still had the SR71 mission. Unfortunately, that was done with long before I got to fly them.
 
ProudPilot said:
Think of the fanless dyson fan. It ionizes air, then uses magnetics to move the ionized field.
Click to expand...

(That's not how the Dyson bladeless fan works. :) ) It uses an intake fan in the base of the unit to blow air out a slot in the upper ring, which inducts a larger mass of air to flow in the same direction (axially through the ring).

But the ion cannon you're talking about does exist, usually in the form of a homemade electronics kit or "antigravity" devices. It uses very high voltages, so it should be awesome when a bug flies through the thing.

NegIonGenW.jpg
 
it is how those old airfilters that had no filter used to work though. Big electrically charges bars in the thing that charged particles to move them through. Did a great job of cleaning the air that went through it, just didn't move very much.
 
If I had a nickel for every startup company that was going to build an amazing new aircraft/spacecraft...


A few more technobabble quotes from the website:
fully integrated hybrid supersonic, non-afterburning engines

co-cured and co-bonded nano-carbon composite structural sheet skins and thermoplastics

Engine produces sufficient power to operate the multi-stage counter rotating, superconducting, dual ring motor electric bypass fans and superconducting electric ring motor axial compressor, power generation and thrust comes from 5-stage superconducting axial turbine.

Flight Controls; quad-redundant all electric actuation and plasma actuator aerodynamic controls
Click to expand...
 
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