Hypersonic aircraft are about 80 percent fuel and oxidizer

Saturday, May 6th, 2023

Andrew Duggleby is chief technology officer of Venus Aerospace, which he co-founded with his wife, Sassie:

Venus Aerospace has the goal of building a hypersonic aircraft that can carry perhaps a dozen passengers and travel at the astonishingly fast speed of Mach 9, or more than 11,000 kilometers an hour.

“How much does the world change if you can get anywhere in an hour?” Sassie Duggleby asked me.

[…]

One problem is that Mach 9 is really, really freaking fast. No airplane has ever gone this fast. The speediest airplane ever built is Lockheed’s SR-71 “Blackbird,” which traveled at Mach 3.2. Anything above Mach 9 and you lose communications with the ground, as plasma starts enveloping the vehicle, as if it were a spacecraft returning to Earth through the upper atmosphere.

In terms of passenger travel comparisons, the Concorde supersonic airliner traveled at Mach 2, or about 2,100 km/hour. Most of the newer generation of supersonic aircraft under development today are in about the same range, such as Boom Supersonic’s cruising speed of Mach 1.7

The Dugglebys are proposing a radically different flight profile. They intend for their aircraft to take off and then perform a 10-minute boost with its rocket engine. This will send the aircraft to an altitude of approximately 50 km, or half the way to space. Oh, and they’re aiming for an airport-like operational cadence of four flights a day.

To that end, the company recently decided on a fuel mix for its engine: room-temperature hydrogen peroxide and Jet-A, the fuel used by a majority of jet aircraft already flying at airports. The company’s engineers also recently achieved liquid peroxide and Jet A detonation, which is important for using a stable fuel composition.

One key to making all of this work is using a new type of engine based on “rotating detonation.” Governments around the world have been researching this technology for more than a decade because it has the potential to increase fuel efficiency in a variety of applications, from US Navy ships to rocket engines.

In a traditional rocket engine, a highly pressurized propellant and an oxidizer are injected into a combustion chamber where they burn and produce a tremendously energetic exhaust plume—Newton’s second law of motion in action. A rotating detonation engine is different in that a wave of detonation travels around a circular channel. This is sustained by the injection of fuel and oxidizer and produces a shockwave that travels outward at supersonic speed.

[…]

In lab tests, the engines have provided about a 10 percent increase in fuel efficiency.

That may not sound like a whole lot, but it is a make-or-break number for Venus Aerospace. By mass, hypersonic aircraft are about 80 percent fuel and oxidizer. By increasing that fuel efficiency, there is actually mass left over for important things like landing gear, wings, and even some passengers. “It allows us to truly build a vehicle that is like an airplane,” Andrew Duggleby said.

[…]

Venus aims to go supersonic with an 8-foot drone before the end of this year and hit Mach 3 by early 2024 with a rotating detonation engine.

The company has about 80 full-time employees and 20 contractors, the majority of whom work at the company’s hangar at the Houston Spaceport. Venus Aerospace so far has raised $41 million, led by Prime Movers Lab, and Sassie Duggleby said she is working on raising a second round of funding.

Comments

  1. Bob Sykes says:

    Both Russia and China have debeloped and deployed hypersonic weapons, and Russia has used them in Ukraine, but the US, so far, has not been able to conduct any successful test. The US is probably 5 years away from getting them.

    The US has spent 30 years fighting Islam. The direct costs are several thousand dead American servicemen, tens of thousands crippled, and an estimated $7 trillion cash. But there was also an opportunity cost. Large parts of America’s military are now obsolete, and the technological has passed to Russia and China.

    The war in Ukraine has also collapsed American influence in the world, and isolated the US/EU/NATO from the rest of the world. The passing of the Western world is underway.

  2. Wang Wei Lin says:

    Bob, I agree about the waste of the war on Islam/terror. Having read the Qur’an 4 times, the Hadiths twice and Islamic jurisprudence, I am thoroughly convinced three things are necessary to solve the Muslim problem. One, export all Muslims with any connection whatsoever to any terror group. Two, do not allow any more Muslims into the country. Three, demonstrate a MOAB, then tell all Islamic regimes that if there is any kind of terror attack against the US then a MOAB will be dropped on the Kabba. But we have leaders who crap their pants instead of protect the country. We’re pretty much doomed.

  3. Jim says:

    Venus aims to go supersonic with an 8-foot drone before the end of this year and hit Mach 3 by early 2024 with a rotating detonation engine.

    I don’t like to be cynical about someone trying to do something, because at least it’s anything other than directly or indirectly commercial real estate, but LMAO—there is no way that this spiel would work on anyone other than a venture capitalist.

  4. Jim says:

    “What’s the fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry?”

    “Start with a large one.”

  5. Buckethead says:

    That design is one in-flight refueling away from the black horse space plane concept. Same fuel/oxidizer mix, size, etc. – only novel item is the rde.

    This will likely end in failure – most do, sadly. But I’m sure the founder is aware of the black horse, and has that in mind.

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