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The competition to be the fastest has consumed man since the very first days of the automobile. According to the short history provided by the North American Eagle Team, the first official record was set in 1898 in Paris, France. The speed was a blistering 39 mph! The 100 mph threshhold was broken in 1904 by another frenchman.
My personal recollections of the competition began in the early 1960's when Craig Breedlove and Art Afrons swapped records on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. Even then the speeds were 500-600 mph and were clearly in the high subsonic regime. The next obvious and, more importantly, physical, barrier was the speed of sound at about 760 mph. Almost exactly 100 years after the first official record was set, the Thrust SSC team led by Richard Noble broke the sound barrier on land on October 15, 1997 on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
Fluid mechanists naturally expect that the flow details of transonic or supersonic runs will be dominated by compressibility and in particular, shock waves. However, few would have guessed that the shock waves would actually be observed and captured on film. The point of this segment of the gallery is to display some of the images I've collected. Links to these images (with short explanations) are given below.
- An amazing shock wave generated during a transonic run.
- Shock waves, including a bow shock, generated during the supersonic run.
- Possible shock waves----this image is very blurry.
- Click here to check out a very nice AVI of the supersonic run.
The image at the above right illustrates the pressure contours over the THRUST SSC as generated by CFD. The JPEG itself was taken from the public-image portion of the Thrust SSC site. Click on the image to see a larger ( 68 Kb ) version.
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