Keep an eye on the seat-back display during the first 20 minutes or so after takeoff, and you’ll see that as your flight climbs, the air temperature plummets. At altitudes near 10.5 km (roughly 35,000 feet), the outside temperature hovers near –50 °C. For a common commercial plane traveling around 920 km/hour, that bitter-cold air is enough to cool the exterior of an aircraft as it cuts through the sky. An ultrafast military jet traveling at more than three times that speed, however, creates such friction with the surrounding air that those frigid temperatures don’t do enough to cool the aircraft and prevent possible damage to equipment. The solution? “Use the fuel as the primary coolant,” says Christopher E. Bunker, a fuels specialist at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. “It sounds crazy, like putting gasoline in your radiator,” he acknowledges. But running

    Heat-absorbing reactions could enable a hydrocarbon propellant to double as a coolant

    10.1021/cen-09618-feature1-waverider-gr1

    The U.S. Air Force X-51A Waverider, an unmanned test vehicle shown here in an artist's rendering, briefly flew at Mach 5.1 (6,100-plus km/hour) in May 2013. Extreme aircraft heating caused by air friction during sustained flight at hypersonic speeds requires novel cooling methods, such as the use of endothermic fuels. (Credit: U.S. Air Force)

    X-51Waveriderjethypersonicair forcesupersonicThis drawing depicts the U.S. Air Force’s X-51A Waverider, a hypersonic test jet.


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    Title :

    Cool fuel for hypersonic aircraft


    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2018-04-30




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    Unknown




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