Sabre Space plane Engine

technology
By
Thatikonda Vineeth
 The Sabre engine is part jet, part rocket, and relies on a novel pre-cooler heat-
exchanger technology. Sabre air-breathing rocket engine is designed to drive
space planes to orbit and take airliners around the world in just a few hours.

To work, it needs to manage very high temperature airflows, and the team at
Reaction Engines Ltd has developed a heat-exchanger for the purpose.

This key element has just demonstrated an impressive level of performance.

It has shown the ability to handle the simulated conditions of flying at more than
three times the speed of sound.

It did this by successfully quenching a 420C stream of gases in less than 1/20th of
a second.
• Sabre can be thought of as a cross between a jet engine and a rocket engine.

• At slow speeds and at low altitude, it would behave like a jet, burning its fuel in a stream of air
scooped from the atmosphere.

• At high speeds and at high altitude, it would then transition to full rocket mode, combining the fuel
with a small supply of oxygen the vehicle had carried aloft.

• The early air-breathing approach would deliver substantial weight savings, and allow a space plane,
for example, to go straight to orbit without throwing away propellant stages on the way up, as
rockets do now.

• But the concept brings with it an immense heat challenge.

• The faster the flow of air into the engine's intake during the high-speed ascent, the higher the
temperature.

• And the heat would rise still further once the flow was slowed and compressed prior to entering the
combustion chambers.

• Such conditions would ordinarily melt the insides of the engine.

• Sabre's pre-cooler seeks to solve this problem by efficiently, and swiftly,
extracting the heat by first passing the intake gases through a tightly packed
array of fine tubing. This tubing is fed with chilled helium.
• In 2012, Reaction Engine limited company, put the pre-cooler in front of a viper
jet engine and sucked ambient air through the heat-exchanger. The gas stream
immediately dropped to minus-150C.

• Now, the company has flipped the set-up, putting the jet engine from an old F-4
Phantom fighter-bomber in front of the pre-cooler to drive hot gases directly
across the piping array.

• The completed Colorado experiment replicates the thermal conditions

corresponding to flight at Mach 3.3, the record-breaking speed at which the
American SR-71 Blackbird spy plane used to operate. Importantly, though, the
pre-cooler took out all the heat.
As I conclude that this technology has wide application, not just in the
immediate, obvious domain of high-speed flight but across the
aerospace industry more generally, and into more commercial
applications - anywhere there's a significant heat-management
challenge and you're looking for ultra-lightweight, miniaturised, high-
performance solutions"