A team of UK engineers have set themselves a three-year target to design and build a car capable of reaching 1000 miles per hour to smash the current land-speed record by nearly 300 mph.
In 1997, their previous vehicle, in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. It became the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier, becoming supersonic for just a few seconds.
But to travel at 1000 mph the new craft 鈥� already called 鈥� will have to shatter rather than just break the sound barrier. And that opens up a Pandora鈥檚 box of problems that must be overcome.
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Bloodhound will be 13 metres long and 6 metres wide. The 6.4 tonne car will be powered by a jet like the one that and a Falcon Hybrid rocket, together providing 20,000lbs of thrust.
鈥淥nce you start [to] go beyond the speed of sound聟a big pressure wall builds up in front of you,鈥� says , an engineer at Swansea University and a member of the Bloodhound team. The vehicle no longer cuts smoothly through the air 鈥� instead it barges it out of the way and creates a shockwave, he says.
Sonic boom boys
That shockwave creates the characteristic sonic boom of supersonic aircraft, and their behaviour in air is well understood after . But no-one has ever produced a sustained 鈥渟onic boom鈥� so close to the ground.
The design team must work out what happens when a shockwave from a car interacts with the ground rushing underneath. No existing wind tunnel can recreate that scenario, so the team must rely on simulations.
It is already using that approach to work out how to combat 鈥渟pray drag鈥�, an unexpected phenomenon first seen when Thrust SSC briefly went supersonic in 1997 and its shockwave ate into the desert floor.
A spray of sand was sucked into the aerodynamic flow in front of the car, producing extra drag. This phenomenon is likely to be a much more serious problem for Bloodhound.
But simulating those drag effects will be difficult, thinks David Sims-Williams, an aerodynamics researcher at Durham University, UK. 鈥淚t鈥檚 hard to know how much sand will end up in the air,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou would have to simulate the behaviour of the sand on the desert floor, and getting all of that into the simulation is tricky.鈥�
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