Test fire for Bloodhound rocket
A British team building a car capable of driving beyond 1,000mph has tested the vehicle's rocket engine.
The motor burned for 10 seconds on a static rig inside a hardened shelter at Newquay airport, Cornwall.
It was predicted to make the loudest sound in the UK on Wednesday and the roar did not disappoint.
The Bloodhound car will attempt next year to raise the world land speed record beyond the current 763mph, and then try to reach 1,000mph in 2014.
The test of its 18-inch (45cm by 3.6m) hybrid rocket was intended as visible demonstration of the progress on the project, and a chance to integrate key elements of the vehicle's propulsion system.
Bloodhound will use the hybrid in addition to a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine to generate the thrust needed to go supersonic.
It will also carry a Cosworth Formula 1 engine, although this will have no direct involvement in driving wheels as it does on a racing car. Instead, the F1 power unit will be used to turn the pump that forces liquid oxidiser into the rocket's fuel chamber.
Wednesday's experimental firing was the first time engineers had seen the hybrid motor, Cosworth and pump - together with their control electronics - run in unison.
F1 engines on their own are very loud but with the rocket also in full throat, the din produced in the shelter was predicted to exceed 180 decibels - many times the sound intensity of the Tornado fighters that used to occupy the building on the edge of the Newquay runway.
The Bloodhound engineering team, and invited guests, watched the firing from a nearby shelter via a video link.
The rocket's designer, Daniel Jubb, surveyed the sensor data and immediately expressed his satisfaction with the way the experiment had gone.
This was just the first of 15 firings that are planned to take place here in North Cornwall to prove the rocket's performance and to certify it safe for use in a manned machine.
Wednesday's test saw the rocket motor fed oxidiser (high-test peroxide, or HTP) at a pressure of 800psi (5MPa). The liquid's passage through a catalyst pack would have seen it instantly decompose into 600C stream of water vapour and oxygen, igniting the fuel grain (hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene, or HTPB) and producing a high level of thrust hoped to be in excess of 6,000lbf (25kN).
This performance will be insufficient to get the Bloodhound car up to 1,000mph, however. For that, the pressure will need to be almost doubled, to produce an average thrust of 25,000lbf, or 111kN, for 20 seconds; with a peak towards the end of the burn of 27,500lbf (122kN).
In combination with the Eurofighter jet engine, the driver Andy Green should have something on the order of 47,000lbf (210kN) at his disposal.
To put that in context, the thrust delivered by one of Concorde's famous Olympus 593 jet engines on full re-heat was about 38,000lbf (170kN). The difference is that the Bloodhound car will weigh only 6.5 tonnes fully fuelled.
Launched in 2008 as an education initiative to spur children's interest in Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the project is in the throes of finalising the budget to complete the build of the vehicle. Although it has had considerable in-kind support from the UK government (in the loan of Eurofighter engines, for example), Bloodhound is fundamentally a private venture that is costing many millions of pounds.
Computer animation showing how the hybrid rocket system will work
Even if the construction bills are covered, there is still the need to find the money to run the car for at least two years - the time it will take first to breach the current land speed record (763mph/ 1,228km/h), and thereafter to raise it beyond 1,000mph (1,610km/h).
"The response from the public has simply been fantastic," said Bloodhound project director, Richard Noble.
"About ?25,000 comes in every month in donations, and that has a big impact on the sponsors because they can see the project has so much good will and support," he told BBC News.
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19818009#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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