Air Force Builds Quiet Mach 6 Wind Tunnel

An anonymous reader writes "To help design 'scramjets' -- vehicles that'll travel thousands of miles per hour as they leave the atmosphere and zip around the globe -- the U.S. Air Force has just funded a wind tunnel that operates quietly at Mach 6. To get a quiet flow, the throat of the Mach 6 nozzle must be polished to a near-perfect mirror finish, eliminating roughness that would trip the flow."

I love being an undergrad...

[metaomni]

To help ensure this ultra-clean condition, engineers enlisted the help of an undergraduate student who is a spelunker. The slender student crawled through a 120-foot section of the wind tunnel, wearing a suit like those worn by technicians in clean rooms, and wiped down the inside of the stainless-steel pipe. The pipe is only 18 inches in diameter.

We undergrads are the guineapigs of science, the people who do the things no one else wants to... all in exchange for $20. And we LIKE IT!

Another old one...

[isny]

Grad student 1: This job sucks.
Grad student 2 (turning on wind tunnel): No, it blows!

Thank you, I'll be here all day.

Re:I love being an undergrad...

[Hal_Porter]

Could be worse though, the lecturers at my Uni would have turned on the airflow if it would have saved them twenty bucks.

sounds cool

[icepick72]

the Mach 6 nozzle must be polished to a near-perfect mirror finish, eliminating roughness that would trip the flow

Thank goodness this "mirror" technology is all around us! I've always been an early tech adopter and there's even one on my bathroom wall. It's so smooth (almost has a "mirror finish") that I can actually rub my hand across it without detecting any roughness. It's exciting to know this is the same stuff the U.S. Air Force is using.

Re:I loved the part where...

[AndroidCat]

Even if it didn't kill you, you'd certainly be exhausted.

Re:"Quiet"?

[slashdotnickname]

From reading the article, I gather "quiet" is being used here as a technical term which is roughly synonymous with laminar, or lack of turbulence (rather than "gee I wish my vacuum cleaner were quiet").

Can anybody with the right background tell me whether that's the case?

You're correct, they mean "quiet" in a laminar sense. Mach 6 wind will sound pretty loud to human ears regardless of how turbulance-free it is, just because of the immense air pressure... but it won't be "noisy" loud.

As far as my background, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Re:18 inches

[thatshortkid]

It will still allow for the scramjets to be tested on a limited scale in real life conditions without creating a multimillion dollar delivery package that costs millions per launch and could (crash|explode|burn up) and cost tens of millions more.

so you're saying it's not the size of the pipe, but how you use it?

Sure, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but can it cool a Pentium 4?

(yes guys, we've still got a good three or four years of Intel bashing ahead of us seeing how the AMD socket-A bashing is still in progress.)

Gillette announces the Mach 7

[SuperBanana]

'Quiet' Mach 6 wind tunnel helps shape future aircraft

Executives at Gillette have announced the Mach 7 in response to Purdue's Mach 6 wind tunnel. "We simply cannot be outdone on Mach numbers."

When asked what the commercial for the Mach 7 will feature, the unnammed executive replied, "jet fighters, women, racecars, women, missiles, women, bullets...it will be more spectacular than watching the entire French airforce crash into a fireworks factory."

Re:Some further comments

[YrWrstNtmr]

There will be two occupants in the cockpit of the future. A man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the man if he tries to touch anything.

Ahh, the life of a grad student

[jaxon6]

Remember, it's not a job, it's an indenture.

Top-Secret details revealed

[2e]

Turns out it's just Steve Jobs talking into a sound-proof tube at MacWorld.
They hit 2 birds with one stone!