China has made significant progress in testing and developing hypersonic technology. Having fired a hypersonic missile that circled the globe, the glider was later found to have fired a submunition into the South China Sea.
According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the new wind tunnel built in China to test hypersonic flights needs so much power that it cannot be connected to the local power grid . The country operates the most powerful network in the world and transmits almost a third of the energy produced on the planet.
To simulate extreme flight conditions at Mach 5 or faster at high altitudes, the wind tunnel runs a 13-megawatt vacuum pump to create an extreme environment from thin air.
But the power needed to run the pump continuously was greater than “the upper limit allowed by the local power distribution network,” said research engineer Li Yanliang of the Beijing Institute of Long March Space Vehicles. article published in the national newspaper.
The energy required to operate this pump is so high that instead of connecting the pumps to the grid , diesel pumps used in ship engines are being used, researchers from the Beijing Institute of Long March Space Vehicles wrote in a published paper. locally.
tests of the past
Wind tunnel testing is critical to knowing whether aircraft and weapon designs can achieve their potential. In the days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the US built wind tunnels for the technologies they were developing, although we don’t know how much energy they consumed.
Researchers say the facility’s name, location and maximum Mach rating are being kept secret, but it has played a crucial role in China’s hypersonic weapons program by allowing ground tests to reveal technical and performance difficulties. critical engineering before sending the missiles for a test flight.
The three-meter-wide wind tunnel requires 900 MW of power if China wants to conduct hypersonic tests under conditions of continuous wind flow at Mach 8. This calculation also assumes that the altitude is 40,000 meters and temperatures exceed 2,700 °C
Chinese scientists involved in the project said replicating the entire sequence of hypersonic flight on the ground was difficult. The rocket booster is built into the combustion chamber of the scramjet engine in a standard hypersonic missile. The rocket could be thrown out of the missile and destroy the wind tunnel when it separates.
A hypersonic missile can travel thousands of miles in the sky at five times the speed of sound or faster, thanks to a small booster rocket that propels it to nearly hypersonic speed, according to SCMP.
Referencia: South China Morning Post
