China’s record-breaking wind tunnel goes Mach 33 thanks to Australian invention
- The world’s largest free-piston driven shock tunnel will allow China to conduct hypersonic experiments and test its space innovations
- A free-piston driven tunnel is known as a Stalker tube, named after Australian space engineer Raymond Stalker who made an engineering breakthrough
The facility, based on a design proposed by Australian scientists, can simulate extreme flight conditions from 2.5 to 11.5 kilometres per second (1.55-7.14 miles per second) – or more than 33 times the speed of sound.
02:06
Chinese hypersonic weapons test ‘has all of our attention’, US General Mark Milley says
With a diameter of 80cm (2.6 feet), the testing tube was nearly twice the size of similar facilities in the West, they said.
“(We) have built the world’s largest free-piston driven expansion tube wind tunnel with high enthalpy,” said the project team led by Lyu Zhiguo, of the Hypervelocity Aerodynamics Institute under the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Centre in Mianyang. Enthalpy is a measurement of heat intensity in the air.
The paper was published in the domestic peer-reviewed journal Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica on September 1.
“It can be used for national-level engineering projects, such as the return capsule of the lunar landing project, entry into an alien atmosphere with an interstellar exploration aircraft and the development of hypersonic vehicles, such as scramjet-powered aircraft, by providing ground test support to simulate the environment at the ‘second cosmic speed’,” they added, referring to the so-called escape velocity from the Earth’s gravitational field.
