Russia and other developments in Hypersonic Research

TR1 wrote:Pay me the amount of money he gets, and I will talk about "all domestic" too all over Twitter and take photo opps in snazzy jackets every other day.


Come back to me when Rogozin actually does something without cameras around him.

ahmedfire wrote:AFAIK the longest distance that US supersonic traveled was 426 km and 5.1 mach ,the missile destroyed and they descibed it as a complete success !

The general director of the corporation "Tactical Missiles" said that Samples hypersonic weapon systems, which reached Mach 8.6 speed, should appear before the end of 2020.

I think Russia doesn't need such technology ,for what ? Russia needs to spend this money on more practical weapons to create a complete high tech military ,
Also i prefer to spend my money to improve my health than to invest on such a weapon that is bullsh!t for me .

GarryB wrote:

Obviously one problem is propulsion or indeed multiple propulsion systems for different stages of flight.

The SR-71 showed what could be done in that regard... it uses two large turbojet engines, but in a special arrangement that allows the air to bypass the turbojet engines and just pass through empty tubes to the rear where the after burner is.

An empty tube with an afterburner on the end is called a ramjet, where air is sucked in and compressed and then fuel is added and ignited generating thrust.

So you simply use the turbojet engine to get the aircraft into the air and put it in full after burner and climb. As you get faster and faster you start feeding air around the turbojet till eventually all the air is going around the turbojet and you can shut the turbojets down and just run on ramjets.

At very high speeds turbojets have problems because the rotational speeds of the blades in the engines gets so high the blades break and the engines overheat.

So, I wonder, how could the heat on a missile tip be conducted thro a missile and then transferred to the propulsion and cooling units?
Currently, I think insulators are used ie something that will stop the heat spreading into the missile. But surely that is hindering the missile AND a waste of energy?

There are a few ideas... one is to use materials that remain strong when heated to high temperatures like Titanium, or ceramic materials. Another option is ablative materials like those used on the heat tiles of the Space Shuttle. Yet another option is a porous skin on the leading edge where friction with the air heats the surface, where you can pump fuel through to keep it cool. Rocket nozzles for very large missiles and space rockets use this method to keep the nozzles from melting already so it is not as far fetched as it might sound.

Obviously there would be problems if you get a fuel blockage and the fuel stopped flowing...

So getting back to my point,I wonder how could the missile draw friction heat in from the tip to enhance performance( and indeed keep the missile intact)?

I rather suspect the final answer will be a combination of new heat resistent ceramic materials that use fuel to distribute heat to the fuel tank and could be used to prep the fuel before it goes to the engine.

Maybe decades into the future,a technology can be developed to absorb laser energy and redirect it towards an attacker?

Like a mirror?

George1 wrote:Flight test of a Project 4202 vehicle

Russia appears to have conducted a flight test of the Project 4202 vehicle on February 26, 2015 from one of the silos in Dombarovskiy. Project 4202 is believed to be some kind of a hypersonic vehicle that will be delivered by the UR-100NUTTH/SS-19 missile. (See also the earlier post.)

Project 4202 launches have never been officially acknowledged, but bits of information appear here and there and there are enough dots to connect, so there is a fairly high degree of certainty that the launch indeed took place. (I must say that I can claim no credit for finding the dots - most of them have been discovered by others.)

First, TsENKI (Center for Operation of Space Ground-Based Infrastructure) in its 2014 acquisition plan listed two Project 4202-related contracts. In the document, the launch is scheduled to take place in January 2015, but it was later postponed. Industry sources were said to confirm that the test was moved to February.

And indeed, on February 26, 2015 a note on a Russian site, which is known to be well connected and generally reliable, said something to the effect that a test is upcoming. The post has been removed since, but only after it was updated to say that the test was unsuccessful.

Finally, a number of people have found a message posted by someone from Yasnyy (which is the name of the city at the Dombarovskiy missile base) later on February 26. The author said that in Yasnyy people felt a missile launch that took place around 13:00 local time (that would be 8:00 UTC).

The February 26, 2015 launch is not the first flight test of the Project 4202 system - at least one took place around September 26, 2013. It appears that another test took place some time in 2014, maybe in September. All we know about the 2014 test is that there is an unaccounted event in the official record of launches conduced that year (the 2013 4202 launch also was not included in the official account). None of the test appear to have been successful.

I guess we'll have to wait for a successful flight test to see an official report on Project 4202 and learn more about the system.

http://russianforces.org/blog/2015/02/flight_test_of_a_project_4202.shtml

GarryB wrote:From what I have read they prefer the idea of using fuel to cool the heated surfaces as preheating the fuel makes it burn hotter generating more thrust.

Of course finding materials that retain structural strength when heated to very high temperatures is useful, and I suspect recent breakthroughs in high temperature aluminium suggest potential for existing materials to be made better at taking heat and retaining strength.

Or how about, Mig-GarryBM?

Can a rocket have wind pressure sensors?

George1 wrote:Russia hopes to have hypersonic missile in 2020

As the Defense Ministry said later Russia had already created a formula of the propellant required for accelerating missiles to such speeds

MOSCOW, March 13. /TASS/. Russia’s Perspective Research Foundation (FPI) is creating an integrated system of modeling for the development of hypersonic aircraft. The system will be made entirely of domestically produced computation modules, the fund’s deputy general director, Vitaly Davydov, told TASS.

Last spring there were reports that the program for creating hypersonic missile technologies in Russia had been finalized already and the first hypersonic missile is to be delivered by 2020. Hypersonic vehicles are expected to fly five times faster than the speed of sound (Mach 5). As the Defense Ministry said later Russia had already created a formula of the propellant required for accelerating missiles to such speeds.

"Now we’ve got to pool efforts by all research centers and organizations operating in that field. For that there should be created one center accumulating all research data and making them available to the contractors concerned. In our opinion there should be no situations in which some researchers have achieved success in thermal or aerodynamic computations, but nobody can use them, because there is no access," Davydov explained.

He believes that the project will make it possible to create a national library of software for supercomputers capable of performing full functional modeling of hypersonic flight vehicles in the interests of all manufacturers involved.

GarryB wrote:
The Mach 3.5 capable SR-71 on the other hand uses its turbojets to get up to speed and altitude, but uses bypass air not going through but going around the turbojet engines for thrust at speeds above mach 2. This means that although it can fly at mach 3.5 the air going through the turbojet engines is the bare minimum to keep them idling when it is flying at top speed.