Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A ramjet airplane engine designed for hypersonic flight that burns fuel in the supersonic airstream produced by the plane.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun aviation A
jet engine capable of propelling anaircraft athypersonic speeds;combustion of thefuel /air mixture occurs atsupersonic speeds
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Recent breakthroughs in scramjet engines could mean two-hour flights from New York to Tokyo.
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Dryden Flight Research Center NASA's high-risk, high-payoff Hyper-X Program is ready to attempt its greatest challenge yet - flying a "scramjet" - powered X-43A research vehicle at nearly 10 times the speed of sound.
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There's no reason to think that a scramjet will be any cheaper than a rocket, and abundant reason to think otherwise.
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But Paull had been building his device -- a cross between a jet and a rocket, known as a scramjet -- for 10 years.
Space Plane 2007
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The so-called scramjet aircraft zipped through the air yesterday at almost 10 times the speed sound.
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A scramjet is a supersonic combustion ramjet, while a ramjet is a jet engine using the engine's forward motion to compress air.
Latest Articles 2010
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a "scramjet" - powered X-43A research vehicle at nearly 10 times the speed of sound.
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The engine on the X-51, called a supersonic-combustion ramjet, or "scramjet," pulls off a couple of especially tricky tasks.
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- They call it a "scramjet," an engine so blindingly fast that it could carry an airplane from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in about 20 minutes -- or even quicker.
From On High 2004
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- They call it a "scramjet," an engine so blindingly fast that it could carry an airplane from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in about 20 minutes -- or even quicker.
Archive 2004-11-01 2004
bilby commented on the word scramjet
"Scramjet is a very handy semi-acronym, standing for Supersonic Combustion Ramjet. In layman's terms this amounts to an engine with a forward vent that scoops in air as it travels through the atmosphere. The air is compressed through narrowing chambers (and therefore heated), before being mixed with hydrogen. This combination combusts, emitting an exhaust through a rearward nozzle and producing enough thrust to reach hypersonic speeds of between Mach 7 (seven times the speed of sound) and maybe as high as Mach 18, leaving nothing more toxic in the air than a trail of water vapour, for the most part."
- Geoffrey Wright, The coming of age of Scramjet, theage.com.au, 10 September 2009.
September 12, 2009