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Two workers at aerospace start-up Reaction Engines are meticulously threading hundreds of ultra-thin metal tubes beneath a set of small bars.
Once each module is complete, sheets of these tubes are arranged in overlapping spirals to form a system that can cool air from 1,000C to below zero faster than the blink of an eye.
The Oxfordshire-based group is part of a UK-led military project aiming to make hypersonic flight a reality with the development of an unmanned air vehicle capable of flying at Mach 5 — five times the speed of sound, or 3,800mph.
The consortium, which includes aero-engine group Rolls-Royce, the Royal Air Force and the defence research agency DSTL, hopes to fly a demonstrator vehicle as early as the middle of this decade.
“The UK needs to accelerate out of the blocks on this,” said Mark Thomas, chief executive of Reaction Engines. The emphasis of the UK project was to build a “low-cost” and “reusable” hypersonic vehicle that came back ready to fly another mission, he added.
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Thomas also sees a role for Reaction Engines’ technology in the recovery of waste heat, “taking waste from a factory or an industrial process, running it through the heat exchanger and extracting more energy”.
The company has the backing of a mix of long-term strategic and financial investors, including BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Boeing, as well as asset management firm Baillie Gifford.
Luke Ward, investment manager at Baillie Gifford, said the “performance and efficiency of almost all engineering systems is limited by successful heat management”.
“By pioneering and proving their technology in one of the most demanding applications out there — hypersonic flight — Reaction Engines has produced an extremely lightweight and high-performance group of heat exchange technologies.”
Thomas is also happy to remain based in the UK, despite the allure of the US market. He insisted: “We are doing very well here so there is no incentive or need for us to jump over to the US. We are very well regarded as a British company that can play in the US market.”