美國發動機公司計劃打造吸氣式火箭發動機

2016/02/02 瀏覽次數:8 收藏
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  2016年2月2日CNN聽力:美國發念頭公司籌劃打造吸氣式火箭發念頭 蘑菇或成為完善的塑料替換資料

  

  We first got seriously moving with the help of steampower in 1802.

  A British mining engineer Richard Trevithick built thefirst large scale steam powered locomotive.

  In 1879, a German engineer Carl Benz developed thefirst internal combustion engine, burning fuel likeoil and petrol to power pistons.

  And so, the car was born.

  Only five years later, in 1884, the first electric car born into life thanks to a British inventorThomas Parker.

  His vehicle was battery powered and most tested on the streets of London.

  A man famously took flight in 1903 in North Carolina in America, with the Wright BrothersOrville and Wilbur and their propeller plane the Wright Flyer 1.

  The flight was just 12 seconds, barely seven meters off the ground, but immutably historic.

  1940 saw the invention of a jet engine by a British engineer Frank Whittle, thus used in fighterplanes towards the end of the Second World War, and in commercial passenger liners from1949, with the British de Havilland Comet.

  Fast forward 50 years or so, there's now a greater sense of urgency among scientists, to findcheaper, more energy efficient quicker ways of getting us around.

  Richard Varvill is an engineer.

  He spent his entire career designing rocket and jet engines.

  Varvill and his colleagues are taking a unique approach, a hybrid rocket and jet engine, theSABRE.

  The fundamental problem is that a state of the art rocket engine, its performance in terms ofits fuel consumption is too high.

  So, the sort of central principle behind the engine that we're working on is to basicallysynthesize a rocket engine with an air-breathing engine like a jet engine.

  For this to be worthwhile, the air-breathing has to operate up to speeds maybe twice as highas a sort of conventional jet engine can range.

  Sort of the holy grail on spaceflight is being together a machine can fly into space and comeback again and do it cheaply and safely and reliably, and in fact, there's been no real progress interms of the way in which we get into space, since the very start of the space age.

  So, the actual technology we're working on is designed to solve that problem.

  Although the SABRE is being designed to take us into orbit, it may usher in a new era of travelback on earth, the Hypersonic Age.

  The LAPCAT plane as they call it promises staggering speeds of more than 3,000 miles anhour, or put another way, flying from London to Sydney in four hours.

  What we have to do now is build a natural running engine.

  And that we're planning to do by the end of the decade.

  And that will then hopefully sort of destroy all the other naysayers that think this can't be done.

  So, yesterday was a holiday, but we're not going to judge if you didn't realize it was BubbleWrap Appreciation Day.

  This happens every year in the last Monday in January.

  It's all about the plastic package cushion that both protects whatever is being shipped andhappens to be really to pop.

  CNN visited the factory and found that bubble wrap is only part of its story.

  Inside Sealed Air's headquarters in Saddle Brook, New Jersey, they may get by the truckloadevery hour.

  But there's something new happening.

  In their lab, they're creating boxes that self inflate, bubbles that inflate on sight and packagingthat takes the shape of a product, once it's cracked much like a hand warmer.

  This is not made out of plastic.

  It's made out of mushrooms.

  Mushrooms that I can eat?

  Mushrooms that you can eat. Oh, it doesn't smell.

  It doesn't smell like mushroom. Does it take like mushroom?No.

  But bubble wraps started it all.

  And like other brilliant inventions, it was made by accident.

  The story begins in 1957 when these guys were trying to make wall paper.

  It didn't quite stick, but from that failure, bubble wrap is born.

  What is the secret to making bubble wrap?

  I'm not going to say that. Come on down.

  This would be one of the resins that we're using on the product.

  And this is essentially plastic?

  This is plastic.

  And then it gets sucked up into these huge tubes...

  From here, we will suck it up into anyone of the three lines.

  To form the bubbles, the plastic is melted down at 500 degrees into a consistency likemolasses.

  Once we vacuum form the bubble, then we include another layer of material to seal the airinside the bubble.

  It's cut down to size by a million dollar machine, and there are over 100 different kinds ofbubble wrap, customized for almost every major shipping company in the world.

  Bubble wrap is actually only 3 percent of the company's revenue.

  Their newer, innovative packaging isn't so easy to pop.

  So, this is kind of a thing of the past and this is a thing of the present and future?

  That's exactly right.

  No bubble wrap.

  So, if you wrap a bobble head in bubble wrap, does that make it a bubble head?

  If you pop bubble wrap with your teeth, does that make it bubble gum?

  If you drop it, do you babble it or bubble it?

  If you skip it, are you thinking outside the bubble?

  I hate to burst your bubble y'all but that wraps things up for us today.

  Stop by tomorrow.We'll keep the puns popping.

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