Researchers DEVELOPED First Hypersonic Speed!

Have you ever felt the need to get somewhere really quickly? Would Mach 17 work? That’s the top speed at which a new prototype engine developed by researchers at the University of Central Florida might potentially hurl an aircraft through the skies, making a trip from Los Angeles to New York in under half an hour. At the heart of this new technology is a new propulsion system that stabilizes detonations and then uses their shockwaves to deliver hypersonic thrust to an aircraft. Sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, doesn't it?

In today’s video, we will be taking a deep dive into how UCF researchers are building this new technology that could make interplanetary travel easier.

UCF researchers say they have trapped a sustained explosive detonation, fixed in place, for the first time. They have finally figured out how to channel its enormous power into thrust in a new oblique wave detonation engine. This could propel an aircraft up to 17 times the speed of sound, potentially beating the scramjet as a hypersonic propulsion method. The new technology will allow jets to achieve speeds of up to Mach 17 without releasing an out-of-control detonation.

Explosions in propulsion systems are nothing new. They have been used to move pistons in ICE’s or internal combustion engines for almost 150 years. The combustion process used by ICE’s is known as "deflagration."

Deflagration, the high-temperature burning of fuel with oxygen, is a relatively safe, slow, and controlled way to release chemical energy and turn it into motion. This technique is similar to how a fire burns in a fireplace. That's exactly why this nice, peaceful form of combustion supports so much of our transport technology. But you need to extract the most possible energy from a unit of fuel to get the best bang for your buck.

Detonation, on the other hand, is a much more violent sort of combustion. It is a quick, chaotic, and often destructive process. It doesn't really require oxygen. All it takes is a single explosive material and energy thrust large enough to break the chemical bonds that keep an already unstable molecule together. It generates exothermic shockwaves that travel at supersonic speeds outwards, releasing massive amounts of energy. Detonations spread supersonically, and the fuel used to power it can be destroyed extremely quickly. They're also far more difficult to regulate and are much more harmful than traditional deflagration reactions.

But, there are benefits to using such a strong reaction to generate thrust. For more than sixty years, people have been trying to harness the raw power of detonation, the most intense kind of combustion, but putting a bridle on a bomb has proven incredibly difficult.

In the beginning, there were pulse detonation engines, which created a series of repeated explosions, similar to a pulse jet. Various teams have worked on these types of engines and they have already been tested in airplanes, most notably in the Scaled Composites Long EZ “Borealis" project, which was created by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory back in 2008.

Next, there were rotating detonation engines, in which the shockwaves from one detonation were tuned to trigger further detonations within a ring-shaped channel. They have to play off of one another, with each pushing the exhaust a little bit faster until it reaches hypersonic speeds. This demands precise placement of each detonation and often results in brief short test runs that last only a few milliseconds, making it impractical to use in a commercial system.

Rotating detonation engines should be more effective than pulse detonation engines simply because the combustion chamber does not need to be cleared out between detonations.
They were thought of as impossible to build right up until researchers at the UCF went ahead and presented a prototype last year in sustained operation. Some of the team members announced that they had successfully tested an engine based on this concept. In their experiment, they carefully controlled the rate at which the fuel was fed into the engine and the concept is due for testing in a rocket launch by around 2025.

🎙VA: Lanzxz @Boat_Oil

[wompstopm]

nuclear pulse detonation engines are the peak in power output.

[magnitudematrix]

I can't wait till the duel cycle RDE engines come out. No need for rockets for space work. Take off from the airport.

[benjamindemontgomery]

does what he say actually match anny what the video show? because Star wars is part of the videos featured in here.

[djbrizzolato]

non sono uno scienziato, ma penso che, per raggiungere mach 20, il motore deve avere una potenza così elevata che solo qualche forma di energia nucleare puo' sviluppare ( un minireattore nucleare per esempio )

[osakanone]

The audio is so-so but the the footage makes this into a shitpost.

[stolyartoad]

I didn’t want to write “first”, but here I am

[nathan_middleton_]

0:17 That's Sydney, not Los Angeles. That's a terrible oversight! Not only is there a huge difference between a flight to LA vs Sydney, but I can't even fathom how such a mistake could have been made. Lost a lot of credibility right there, and makes me severely question how reliable your content is!

[alexlarson]

You clearly don't understand what you're talking about. You've got the wrong animations showing types of propulsion not matching what you're referring to

[buffalosoldier]

Is this a computer generated voice? Mispronunciations are a dead giveaway…

[perpetualimpressions]

what a difficult video to watch. it de-fla-gration not de-flag-ration. non of the images even line up with the subject matter. there are hundreds of pictures and videos of the Borealis yet they show just a standard long ez. they just messed a bunch of stock videos together and read a popular mechanics article