China builds world's fastest wind tunnel
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E-mail China Plus, March 22, 2018
China is building the world's fastest wind tunnel, which is capable of testing aircraft traveling at up to 25 times the speed of sound.
The new tunnel, with a length of 265 meters and a diameter of 2.5 meters, is targeting flight simulations from Mach 10 to 25 (12,250 to 30,625 kp/h), 10 to 25 times the speed of sound, as Han Guilai, a researcher with China's State Key Laboratory of High Temperature Gas Dynamics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), told China Central Television.
Dubbed "the cradle of aircrafts," wind tunnels can test how air will pass over a solid object, and they are commonly used by spacecraft engineers to test spacecraft designs.
China's current wind tunnels could simulate flights ranging from Mach 5 to 9, and researchers from the Beijing-based CAS have successfully tested one hypersonic plane in a wind tunnel at such speeds.
The research was published in the journal "Science China: Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy" in February. It unveiled the "I Plane" model, which is capable of transporting passengers and payloads from Beijing to New York City within two hours, much faster than any commercial airline flight could.
The facility under development, however, is expected to cover China's test scales ranging from Mach 5 to 25, thus help the country to take a globally leading role in the field, though competition from other countries is still fierce, according to Han.
"The new tunnel will aid the engineering application of hypersonic technology by duplicating the environment of extreme hypersonic flights. Once issues are discovered during these ground tests, they will be ironed out before test flights begin," said the researcher.
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