20 February 2018 C O M I N G U P O V E R T H E N E X T T W O Y E A R S A R E T E S T S T O 6 0 0 , 8 0 0 A N D F I N A L LY 1 0 0 0 M P H The mission statement for the UK's Bloodhound SSC is to create a unique, high technology project, focused around a 1,000mph World Land Speed Record attempt. To share this engineering adventure with a global audience and to inspire the next generation by bringing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to life in the most exciting way possible. At Newquay airport there were kids zones everywhere involving STEM activities – competitions for urethane foam SSC models powered by model rocket squibs. But perhaps the highlight of the day was a Rolls-Royce engineer in red stilettos showing that it's possible to be cool and still be an engineer. The numbers involved in taking a land based, wheeled vehicle to 1000mph are as big as the ambition itself. An interesting indication of enormity of the task is the wheels. At 1000mph they will be spinning at 10,200rpm (170 times per second) 4 x faster than those on a Formula One car and generating 50,000 radial g - a far cry from ‘normal’ wheel configurations. Bloodhound SSC will be the first – and, probably for a long time, the only – land-based vehicle in history to travel for a sustained period of time well above the speed of sound. One of the crucial aspects of the aerodynamics of the car is unique, in that the airflow is supersonic for a sustained period, and in particular there are multiple shock waves, which interact with the ground. Much of the early aero work was concerned with coming up with a shape for the car that was as far as possible Mach number insensitive. That is, it was stable and exhibited neutral lift and downforce, whatever the speed and perhaps more importantly at 1000mph or Mach 1.3 it was in its most stable configuration. “The last thing we want is to make the world’s fastest plough,” jokes Dr Ben Evans of Swansea University, one of Bloodhound’s CFD engineers. Things tend to happen in unpredictable ways as the car goes from subsonic, transonic to supersonic. And even with some of the best CFD code and hardware in the world available at the Zienkiewicz Centre for Computational Engineering in Swansea, the renowned SPECIAL FEATURE B Y D R C H A R L E S C L A R K E
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