It would quiclkly lead space shuttle design with ceramic tiles and everything, not suitable for frequent commercial flights.
I wonder how far the state of the art in ceramics has come since the design of the space shuttle.
Jet engine with LENR realistic?
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Eric good question, and I'm not any way specialist, but what was on my mind thermal expansion because of big temp differences. Wasn't that a reason why shielding in shuttle was made on separate rather small tiles instead of bigger plates. If I remember correctly also SR-71 was leaking fluids when in hangar, because seams and gaskets were adjusted for higher body temperatures in high speed cruising.
What comes for example to fan blades, I think they have been coated with ceramics since 70's, but maybe flight surfaces cannot be coated same way (unless titanium maybe. Aluminium alloy would nmelt anyway). I don't know how in practise, but googled and found that Alumina and Titanium have pretty same Thermal Expansion Coefficient (8.1 vs 8.6) where Aluminium has 22.2 (or even worse typical 7075 aviation aluminum alloy has 25.2@250C).
http://asm.matweb.com/search/S…rial.asp?bassnum=MA7075T6 -
Argon, you probably know this,
at the rush of being pedanticwhile certaing static components in a jet engine hot section are often sprayed with ceramics,
the hot section fans, and stators are all nickel cobalt xyz alloys with relatively low
coefficients of expansion because they have to maintain tight tolerances from idle to full power,
and are cooled via internal air passages
the ceramics can't handle the mechanical loads in rotating parts I believeLENR will have to make a quantum ( an ambiguous multiplier when you have no idea within several orders of magnitude) leap in energy density for aviation, and then you will still have to move all that heat out of one medium through an exchanger and into your working fluid. A small turboprop engine weighing 500 lbs will easily generate 1 MW for thousands of hours. A 30 megawatt peaking genset uses a core from older 737 engine and is the size of an office desk.
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