China working on wind tunnel that could send aircraft to US in 14 minutes: Report

China is all set to create the world's fastest wind tunnel to simulate hypersonic flight which can potentially cover 12 kilometres in one second, a report in South China Morning Post said.

Hypersonic aircraft are vehicles that travel at speeds of Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, or above.

The revolutionary invention, at this speed, could potentially reach the western side of the world in less than 14 minutes, reportclaims.

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According to the report, Zhao Wei - a deputy director of the State Key Laboratory of High Temperature Gas Dynamics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who is working on the project has declared that they aim to have the space functioning and ready to use by 2020, in order to deliver China's demand of weapon development programme.

Zhao says that it could 'help uplift the development of hypersonic technology, more so in military sectors by replicating the surrounding of extreme hypersonic flights in order to understand if any glitches occur in the moment.'

Dafang Wu, a professor at the school of aeronautic science and engineering at Beihang University in Beijing said that this creation will possibly be 'one of the most powerful and advances ground test facilities for hypersonic vehicles around the world', although, he is no involved in this project.

The construction of the new tunnel would be carried out by the same team that created JF12, a hypervelocity denotation-driven shock tunnel in Beijingefficient enough to replicate flight conditions at speeds from Mach 5 to Mach 9 at a height of 20 to 50 kilometres.

This tunnel will also serve as a test for scramjet, a newer jet engine created specifically for hypersonic flights.

It will consist of test chamber with enough space for larger models with a wingspan of about three meters. Moreover, in order to accumulate high-speed airflow, the researchers will discharge a number of tubes containing a combination of oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen gases for a trail if explosions which could generate one gigawatt of power in a microsecond, saidZhao.

He further informed that the temperature of the aircraft will go up to 8,000 Kelvins, or 7,727 degrees Celsius using the shock waves which will be transmitted into the test chamber using a metallic tunnel. This entails that the surface will be about 50% hotter than the sun.

Due to the generation of the massive amount of heat, it is required to be covered by a special material with the effective cooling system within the airframe to balance the heat or else it could lead to engine slow down and eventually break apart during long-haul flights.

In March, China successfully carried out seven test flights of its hypersonic glider WU-14 or DF-ZF at speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 10.

“With practical hypersonic airplanes, a two-hour flight to anywhere in the world will be possible as well as a cut down in the cost of travel by 99% with reusable spacecraft technology. These flights will, therefore,be foreseen as a source of national security, civilian transportation and space access" Jiang Zonglin, lead developer of the JF12, told media reporters.

At present, the most powerful wind tunnel is America’s LENX-X located in Buffalo, New York state, operating at a speed of 10 kilometers in one second which is almost 30 times the speed of sound.