China, Wind Tunnel Hypersonic Mach 30 Speed Officially Operates
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) confirmed that the Mach 30 wind tunnel beacon project is officially operational.
For this success, a CAS scientist, professor Guilai, claims that currently China is 20 to 30 years ahead of the West in the field of developing hypersonic air vehicles up to Mach 30 or the fastest in the world.
Wind tunnel facilities are actually commonly owned by institutions engaged in aerial vehicle design services.
As in Indonesia, the wind tunnel is owned by the BPPT Aerodynamics, Aerolastics and Aeroacoustics Technology Center (BBTA3) which is located in the Science and Technology Research Center (PUSPIPTEK) area, South Tangerang.
However, since NASA succeeded in developing air vehicles with speeds of up to Mach 7 in the 1960s, until now, as quoted from the South China Morning Post (SCMP), there has been no wind tunnel facility in the world that accommodates research on hypersonic aircraft speeds up to Mach 30 or 10.3 km per second until the Chinese finally did it.
The presence of a wind tunnel facility called JF-22 will later provide China with flexibility in conducting aerodynamic tests of Mach 30 hypersonic vehicles and weapons, such as airplanes, spacecraft, and hypersonic missiles.
Before the world's largest wind tunnel facility JF-22 was recently inaugurated, China was known to already have another wind tunnel facility called JF-12.
Since conducting its first test in the JF-12 wind tunnel in 2014, China has successfully developed a variety of hypersonic high-speed weapons and aerial vehicles.
For example, the DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle which releases DF-17 ballistic missiles with hypersonic speeds of Mach 5-10 to hypersonic missiles YJ-21 with speeds of Mach 10.
In the process, China has had a high success rate in hypersonic flight tests in recent years because it uses chemical explosions to generate high-speed airflows instead of the mechanical compressors used in other countries.
If China's JF-12 tunnel facility is able to record satisfactory test results and produce hypersonic missiles as mentioned above, of course the JF-22 facility is capable of producing more sophisticated and fast hypersonic weapons and aerial vehicles.
This is what the West is really worried about.
In a seminar in China recently, Professor Guilai, revealed, the JF-22 wind tunnel facility requires enormous electrical power of up to 15 gigawatts or the equivalent of the energy capacity produced by the world's largest hydroelectric dam, the Three Gorges Dam.
A wind tunnel is urgently needed to simulate hypersonic speed rides. The idea of a wind tunnel is quite simple.
To find out how a shape will perform at a certain airspeed, simply build the shape, then hold it in a test chamber and watch as air is forced through it at the desired speed.
