New Hypersonic Configuration - Chinese Academy of Science

[bobbymike]

From Space Daily;

How to design a hypersonic airplane that travel from Beijing to New York in only two hours? Dr. Cui Kai and his group from State Key Laboratory of High Temperature Gas Dynamics, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences set out to tackle this problem.

After three years of innovative research, they presented a body-wing-blending configuration with double flanking air inlets layout to aim at design requirements of high lift-to-drag ratio as well as high volumetric efficiency of next generation hypersonic airplanes..............


http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/A_new_conceptual_configuration_for_air_breathing_hypersonic_airplanes_999.html

 

[phrenzy]

Sorry to take this off track, this just caught me of guard.
She looked so sad that she was keeping hypersonics from the people.

 

[phrenzy]

On topic, are they implying that they have a solution to effective scramjet inlet geometry?
It never ceases to bug me seeing design studies and program proposals going ask the way back to the 50's that plan to use scramjet propulsion. Even with recent developments the total run time for all white world scramjets ever made is only a couple hundred seconds.
Are they all just mad optimists assuming, like fusion energy, that practical scramjets were just a decade or two away?
I'm not saying there is some perfected black project scramjet engine sitting around in a P&W basement but lots of mid term planning for decades has assumed scramjets will be on tap to power various aircraft going back a long ways.