[TT1] Finally, the corn industry has a new outlet for their excess product so they can stop turning into into liquid sugar or crap fuel! Of course, given the government efforts to force corn products onto everyone, I expect we will all soon be forced to have everything, including out clothes, covered in a novel self-healing clear coat.
[TT2] Faster than a speeding pulsar?!
[TT3] Just imagine if they’d had this last year, then this movie would have been over right quick. Which is good, because microbes are rather durable little things.
[TT4] The evolutionary differences between male and female serial killers.
[TT5] It wasn’t an Earth-shattering KA-BOOM! But it was a big KA_BOOM! Good thing it happened up above the air traffic lanes.
[TT6] Suddenly that guy who likes his Dr. Pepper served warm doesn’t seem so strange now, does he? (Yes, he still does…)
[TT7] The TED battery (not to be confused with the talks, although maybe they want that?) is a self contained hot box. It takes electricity, converts it to heat to melt a “unique phase change material” (read: Silicon), and then uses a heat engine to turn it back into electricity. Supposedly it can hold 1.2 MW in a 20′ box. Not sure for how long, since heavily insulated is still not perfectly insulated, but at this point, having a system that can store most of it’s energy for even a few days would be valuable for wind and solar power grids.
[TT8] Dusting of an old concept for a cheaper way to get to orbit.
[TT9] Killing one missile with two. If I’m reading this right, it sounds like the first missile went in for the kill, with the second watching the attempt and updating it’s tracking data, so if the first misses, the second has better data to attempt a kill with. And if the first hits, the second can possibly divert with better data to make it’s own kill with.
[TT10] The Boeing-Sikorsky Defiant had it’s maiden flight. I’ve always been partial to co-axial helicopters, as the tail-rotor always struck me as a serious weak point in the design. Anything takes out that tail rotor, and the bird spirals down. With co-axial, you gotta take it out proper, no cheating with a cheap shot to a tail rotor.
[TT11] Pretty sure that’s gonna be a new type certification.
[TT12] The thing about these new kinds of designs is, I feel, that I keep hearing about the latest new concept, but none of these ever seem to make it to market. Maybe this one will.
[TT13] Color me all kinds of skeptical. That list has a whole lot of “No (Key aerodynamic property or effect that EVERY OTHER FLYING THING HAS!)”. We’ve been playing with powered Frisbee’s for a long time, and this reads like “SOLAR ROADS!”.
[TT14] These are the winners? Meh. Although I kinda like Team Trek and Team Silverwing.
[TT8] So this is neat but I also remember how the Aerospike Engine was gonna fix everything and we still aren’t using them. (And how Waverider hypersonic designs were gonna fix everything before that, and we aren’t using those either, beyond some purpose-built research vehicles.)
Not to say it’s a bad idea that won’t work, it’s just that regenerative-cooled turbopump-fed conical nozzles are a pretty solid incumbent and it’s going to take more an incremental improvement to knock those out of place.Report
[TT8] My bet is they will run into material issues. 😉
A lighter engine can be built if they use a natural aspirating pulse jet that internally converts to ram jet at about mach 0.70. The turbines just add weight. Material science will catch up one of these days.Report
I think the material issue will be one of cost rather than ‘we just don’t have it yet’. As in by the time they get one working, the savings over a traditional SRB will have diminished too much for anyone to care.
We have a lot of amazing materials in the MatLib, but many of them can only currently be produced in small batches at great cost, and they are just waiting for the right application to justify larger batch production. Now if the Pentagon suddenly decided this was a great way to get satellite killers into orbit…Report
Imagine beating a piece of combustor metal with a >14 pound pressure hammer at 60-200 times per second……do that for 15 minutes…..Now imagine the hammer is at 900F heating each time it contacted followed by a splash of cold air.
It’s going to take something pretty sturdy, and probably pricey.Report
Exactly.Report
At some point steady-state combustion reveals its own value.Report
Tt7 – I’m guessing 1.2 MW is peak power output? I couldn’t find that stat in the article or the website, nor an energy capacity number in some (10^3 series metric prefix) Watt-Hours.Report
That’s either a press release for lazy journalists, or it’s a press release for vaporware. My first clue was “unique phase change material”. It’s sounds like a good idea, and if they got one working, could be useful, but the presser smells a bit fishy. If anyone finds better information, feel free to link to it.Report
The diagram at the site shows a heat engine for conversion from stored heat back to electricity. Unless they can produce quite high temperatures, the efficiency of that step will not be very good.
My standard for comparison is the pumped-hydro station up the road from me. If the upper reservoir is full, four hours at 320 MW maximum output. Round-trip efficiency is a bit over 80%.Report