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British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

uk.reuters.com

21–30 of 109 posts

Re: British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

#21

From the article: "The company has deliberately avoided filing patents on its heat exchanger technology to avoid details of how it works - particularly the method for preventing the build-up of frost - becoming public." I would think that for something like this, the patent system would actually work fine. Anybody who tries to make this is going to be located in the US, Canada, Western Europe, or Japan. It's not like…

Maybe the principals are easily applied in a just different enough to not violate patent way.

Maybe they don't want to spend the time or money in court instead of on getting to market.

Maybe they know big aerospace companies will be able to out spend them on lawyering/lobying and so will loose.

Maybe they believe their time to make profit > than the duration of patent protection.

Re: British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

#22

From the article: "The company has deliberately avoided filing patents on its heat exchanger technology to avoid details of how it works - particularly the method for preventing the build-up of frost - becoming public." I would think that for something like this, the patent system would actually work fine. Anybody who tries to make this is going to be located in the US, Canada, Western Europe, or Japan. It's not like…

SpaceX doesn't have any patents either. Musk has specifically said this is because in the long term their main competitors are the chinese, who treat patents as recipe books.

Re: British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

#23

Here's a documentary that was broadcast on BBC4 a couple of months ago about Bond and his quixotic journey to get HOTOL/Skylon into the sky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ_a21fPkYM It includes a test-firing of the new heat-exchanger at the end.

One of those truly inspirational stories, where people dedicate their lives over decades to an idea and see it through. Granted, their aircraft isn't yet built, but they're well on the way.

Re: British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

#24
post #5

Elon Musk was specifically asked about this technology when he was at Martin School last week. He didn't hear about it, but he seemed skeptical that it would work better than rockets. His response here: http://youtu.be/c1HZIQliuoA?t=48m55s SpaceX might still be the first one with a re-usable rocket if they finish the Raptor engine in 3 years. Plus, his could actually be used to land on Mars, while this can only be us…

SpaceX are absolutely right to be using tried-and-tested technology in their rockets, and so Elon Musk's scepticism is sensible in context of what they're trying to achieve. The technology mentioned in this article is more applicable 10, 20 years down the line; the R&D costs would be prohibitive to make it cost-effective to be used by SpaceX now, even if they could get it to work reliably and secure the IP rights.

Re: British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

#25
The BBC article, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20510112 has some nice explanatory graphics.

It appears they are using a liquid nitrogen boiler to chill a helium loop through their heat exchanger and in turn chill the air.

So, perhaps someone better at these calculations can help out, cooling incoming air by 160°C by moving nitrogen from -195°C to -15°C is going to require them to haul up liquid nitrogen and cool a bunch of atmospheric nitrogen that they don't really need. The heat of vaporization is the key that will make their solution win, but by what factor? How many grams of nitrogen must they haul to chill a gram of atmospheric oxygen?

Re: British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

#26
post #5

Elon Musk was specifically asked about this technology when he was at Martin School last week. He didn't hear about it, but he seemed skeptical that it would work better than rockets. His response here: http://youtu.be/c1HZIQliuoA?t=48m55s SpaceX might still be the first one with a re-usable rocket if they finish the Raptor engine in 3 years. Plus, his could actually be used to land on Mars, while this can only be us…

> while this can only be useful where you still have atmosphere and oxygen

The planned SABRE engine can act as a rocket as well closing the intake and using stored liquid oxygen so it would be capable of operating without an atmosphere and oxygen and landing on Mars.

Re: British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

#27

Does anyone have guesses on how the heat exchanger might work to prevent frost? Perhaps ultrasound?

My guess is that they inject liquid hydrogen into the hot air, so the cooling is actually done in free "air" rather than on the surface of a traditional metal heat exchanger - that would explain how they cool it so fast and help explain how they prevent frost in the heat exchanger during the cooling.

This reformulates the problem into "how do we prevent the injectors from..."

a) Melting (liquid hydrogen inside would help a lot).

b) Preventing the liquid hydrogen inside the injectors from boiling and rupturing the piping and injectors.

c) Avoid all the standard hydrogen problems (e.g. embrittlement).

In this guess, (a) and (b) would be a delicate engineering balance to keep the injectors cold enough to retain their strength yet warm enough to not ice up. (c) has known solutions.

Re: British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

#28
post #9

Sounds like quite a disruptive innovation in the aerospace industry. Always wondered how much it cost to get innovations like this off the ground. $400m funding round sounds pretty serious...

That's the blind, the bet required to play, in aerospace, it's not a lot of money at all by their standards.

Or by social media standards. I know it's a rather over-used meme now, but I'm again reminded of Instagram's $1b buyout vs. this.

This seems like a good blue-sky venture for a scientific philanthropist. There's a lot that could go wrong, it might not work (though as pointed out elsewhere, this isn't all theory - they have tested the heat exchanger in real life on a proper jet engine), but it could be a big win. If only someone like Gates could put down $400m for a chance of a big pay off later.

Re: British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

#29
post #25

The BBC article, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20510112 has some nice explanatory graphics. It appears they are using a liquid nitrogen boiler to chill a helium loop through their heat exchanger and in turn chill the air. So, perhaps someone better at these calculations can help out, cooling incoming air by 160°C by moving nitrogen from -195°C to -15°C is going to require them to haul up liquid nitrog…

The liquid nitrogen is just used for the ground tests. On the Skylon itself, this cooling capacity will come from boiling the liquid hydrogen fuel.

Re: British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

#30
post #5

Elon Musk was specifically asked about this technology when he was at Martin School last week. He didn't hear about it, but he seemed skeptical that it would work better than rockets. His response here: http://youtu.be/c1HZIQliuoA?t=48m55s SpaceX might still be the first one with a re-usable rocket if they finish the Raptor engine in 3 years. Plus, his could actually be used to land on Mars, while this can only be us…

> so only for launches to orbit Isn't that our biggest challenge right now? I like how dismissive you are of it, like we have somehow overcome that and are now on our way to Mars any day now. If someone was able to reduce the cost of going into orbit by as little as 10% that would be a MASSIVE achievement. Getting out of the atmosphere is still a massively costly, logistical, and dangerous challenge.

But you don't reduce the cost of going into orbit by 10%. Not even in the absurdly best case.

Let us take Elon at his word that increasing the size of the booster stage by 5-10% can replace these engines entirely, and assume that it actually is 10%. The booster stage is mostly fuel, which varies as volume, but the costs are all in the metal part, which scales as area. So this size increase costs you at most 6.6%. It actually costs less because the complicated rocket thrusters are left unchanged. So let's say 5%.

But we're not reducing the cost of the whole rocket by 5%, just the booster stage. If we assume that the booster stage is, say, 70% of the rocket we're only saving a maximum of 3.5% in reductions on the existing rocket components.

But we haven't yet factored in the cost of the new component. Which is, after all, very much like the existing engines except more complicated. In a Falcon 9 we have 9 rockets, so each one is about 11% of the cost of the total. If we strap on 3 of these new things, which are much like rockets except more complicated because of the whole hybrid thing, they each can cost a maximum of about 1.2% of the total cost to stay within our budget.

So unless these things, which are more complicated than rockets, cost you 1/10th as much, you don't get any cost saving at all. It is difficult to see how they can be this cheap.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Elon has plans to reduce the cost to orbit by another factor of 10 in a similar time frame to when these might actually become commercially available. (He's already reduced launch costs by a factor of 10.)

A large part of how he's managed to reduce costs so much is that he does this kind of common sense analysis in his sleep, and uses it to ignore everything he has to ignore, and zero in on what he needs to pay attention to. The numbers on this technology simply don't add up for space.

(But they don't have to. A practical technology to double the speed of jets by a factor of 2 will be extremely interesting to various militaries. Plus the potential savings for the existing airline industry - which is a much, much bigger market than space right now - means that they are going to have no shortage of potential customers. Elon is simply not one of them.)

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