The Global Times just affirmed the news story carried out by the South China Morning Post recently at the end of May 2020 about the substantial progress in SCRAMJET research by the team led by Dr. Fan Xuejun from the Institute of Mechanics and it's told that Dr. Fan is nominated to be “the innovator of the year” by the prestigious and influential CAS.
The Institute of Mechanics was founded by Dr. Qian Xuesen, the Father of China's Rocketry, the most prominent rocket scientist in his time.
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China’s hypersonic cruise missile sees technological breakthrough: reports
By Liu Xuanzun
Source: Global Times
Published: 2020/6/8
Photo: Zhang Haichao
A top Chinese science institute recently
made record-breaking progress in a scramjet program which Chinese media speculate could lead to significant advances in the development of
China's hypersonic cruise missile, another type of hypersonic weapon that is
more powerful than China's DF-17 hypersonic glide-boost missile.
A team led by
Fan Xuejun at the Institute of Mechanics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a type of scramjet that
ran continuously for 600 seconds in a ground test, Weihutang, a program on military affairs affiliated with state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), reported on over the weekend.
This broke the world record of 210 seconds set by the US' X-51 aircraft, Weihutang said.
A powerful
scramjet, also known as
supersonic combustion ramjet, is crucial for a hypersonic cruise missile to reach hypersonic speed,
but developing one is highly challenging due to issues with heat resistant materials and cooling of the engine, the report said.
Hypersonic weapons are known for their
high speeds and
unpredictable trajectories, which render most of the current generation of
air defense systems useless against them.
China unveiled its DF-17 missile for the first time at the National Day military parade
on October 1, 2019. This type of missile was widely believed by military observers to be a hypersonic weapon due to its aerodynamic design.
Weihutang said that the
DF-17 is a type of
hypersonic glide-boost missile, meaning that it is propelled into the sky via a rocket and glides in the air using shock waves generated by its own hypersonic flight, but the other type of hypersonic weapon, the
hypersonic cruise missile, has constant thrust thanks to the scramjet, which gives it a longer range and even more unpredictable trajectory.
The DF-17 is a short to medium-range missile, and using a scramjet can potentially extend its range by
at least five times, allowing it to become
intercontinental, Shanghai-based news website eastday.com reported on Friday, citing estimations by experts.
Since a hypersonic cruise missile does not require a rocket as large as the one used by a glide-boost missile, its size and weight are smaller,
allowing it to be stealthier, the eastday.com report said.
The DF-17 is not the only item in China's hypersonic aircraft program. In August 2018, the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation successfully launched the
Xingkong-2, or Starry Sky-2, China's first waverider hypersonic flight vehicle.
It is not known if the Xingkong-2 is a boost-glide or cruise missile, but a CCTV program aired in late 2019 suggested it might use a different flight pattern to the DF-17.
Other countries including the US and Russia are developing both types of hypersonic weapons, and it will be natural to see China develop new ones following the DF-17, experts told the Global Times.