New Technology Could Make It Possible To Fly Anywhere In The World In 4 Hours; the new “Sabre” engine system could be cooled by more than 1,000 degrees Celsius in .01 seconds, enough to fly at five times the speed of sound

July 18, 2013 Leave a comment

New Technology Could Make It Possible To Fly Anywhere In The World In 4 Hours

ALEX DAVIES JUL. 16, 2013, 3:32 PM 25,959 44

British aerospace firm Reaction Engines is working on an aircraft it believes would be able to take passengers anywhere in the world in just four hours. The vehicle would also be able to fly in outer space. Reaction Engines says there’s only one truly new technology in the aircraft that makes those things possible: the precooler. In a new video, chief engineer Alan Bond explains that air entering the new “Sabre” engine system could be cooled by more than 1,000 degrees Celsius in .01 seconds. That ability would allow a jet engine to run at higher power than what is possible today. More power = more speed. Enough to fly at Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, “pretty easily,” Bond says.The Telegraph explained the technology in an article in late 2012:

The breakthrough technology is a cooling system which uses an array of thin pipes, arranged in a “swirl” pattern and filled with condensed helium, to extract heat from air and cool it to minus 150C before it enters the engine.

In normal circumstances, this would cause moisture in the air to freeze, coating the engine with frost, but the company has also developed a method which prevents this from happening.

The company eventually hopes to use its cooling technology to build a plane that transports 300 passengers and flies like a rocket. It will “transform high-speed aviation,” Bond says, adding, “we have no competitors. We are unique.”

The aircraft itself will measure 276 feet long, and be called the Skylon. It would take off and land horizontally (like a plane), which would make it easier to reuse than a standard rocket. But in addition to the $1.1 billion price tag for each one, there’s another big downside: The Skylon has no windows, a major bummer for those excited to fly in space.

The company is currently in the process of testing the system. Test flights of the Skylon are planned for 2019.

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment