Henry:
I'm in agreement with your broad point: there are no engines available
today other than in museums. But....
Rather a lot of folks are looking at supersonic business jets just now,
some are even building same. As the J58 showed, the path to a supersonic
engine is not all that obscure; one _just_ needs to replace the compressor
section with blades that will take the high temperatures coming out of the
inlet. It's not an impossible problem and the market for supersonic b-jets
(north of 200 units) does appear to justify that investment.
Bill
On Wednesday, September 21, 2016, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Wed, 21 Sep 2016, John Dom wrote:
For doing it today, the one thing I would wonder about is whether we have
the right engines for it -- sustained high-supersonic speed has not been
a priority for jet-engine design in recent decades...
Eat your hearts out maybe, but Concords flew, not rarely but daily with
passengers at Mach 2 over the oceans. Piece of cake!
Yeah, there were a *few* examples of operational sustained-supersonic
engines -- the Olympus that powered Concorde, the J58 of the Blackbirds,
and the B-58's J79 -- but not many, and they're all 50+ years old.
Henry
