Planes are five times faster than sound

The US Air Force intends to build a functional aircraft based on the prototype hypersonic X-51 Waverider, tested about two years ago in the Pacific Ocean. According to DARPA specialists working on the project, as early as 2023, a usable version of the jet aircraft with speeds above Mach XNUMX may appear.

X-51 during test flights at an altitude of 20 meters reached a speed of over 6200 km/h. His scramjet managed to accelerate to this speed and could have squeezed out more, but ran out of fuel. Of course, the US military is thinking about this technique not for civilian, but for military purposes.

The Scramjet (short for Supersonic Combustion Ramjet) is a combustor supersonic jet engine that can be used at speeds far in excess of that of a conventional ramjet. A jet of air flows into the inlet diffuser of a supersonic jet engine at a speed exceeding the speed of sound, is decelerated, compressed, and converts part of its kinetic energy into heat, causing an increase in temperature. Then fuel is added to the combustion chamber, which burns in the stream, still moving at supersonic speed, which leads to a further increase in its temperature. In the expanding nozzle, the jet expands, cools and accelerates. Thrust is a direct consequence of the pressure system that develops within the engine, and its magnitude is proportional to the change in the amount of time in the amount of motion flowing through the air engine.