tilize its he heated air in transit to the combustors?
Howdy
"What the company has right now is a remarkable heat exchanger that is able to cool air sucked into the engine at high speed from 1,000 degrees Celsius to minus 150 degrees in one hundredth of a second."
How much of this air can be cooled that quickly? The rate of cooling is missing some important data. The aircraft could (will) utilize its LOX and LH tanks surely, in some form of interface with a manifold that contains the transiting air.
The challenge is to expose the air to the cold fuel by maximizing the area of the tubes containing the liquid combustants. So the word "nesting" is instructive. Will the tubes be concentric, perhaps a complement of 7-10 in an axial/helical arrangement? Given enough room, the startling "rate" in the press release becomes a little less dramatic?
The speeds whilst under turbojet propulsion are transient, so for how long can this exchanger function? If the need is for only five or so minutes between the critical Mach 2.5 and Rocket mode, then an evaporative manifold could be used to store the the rocket fuel as a gas, to be reinjected into the chamber at rocket speeds.
Would the Turbo jet's fuel be Hydrogen? Why not, that would simplify the inter- modal concept's fuel architecture.
We are now back to the classic 1960 argument between Canaveral and Edwards.
Why waste Rocket mode off the pumpkin patch if an aerodynamic platform could launch the Rocket at 50,000 feet?
Back to heat exchange. I see a nested helical tube arrangement whose only limit would be space, enough room to accomodate the airflow requirements of combustion. Manufacture? Carbon?
Maybe they should apply for some patent protection. Then again, since it is only on "paper", it sounds suspiciously like a wind-up.