It was recently announced that the BLOODHOUND Aerodynamics team have resolved the issue of excessive tail lift at supersonic speeds. The story is still unfolding in the Engineering section (see Parametric Study and Design of Experiments), but 1K Club members had an exclusive preview of the shape that has emerged.

by Ron Ayers, Chief Aerodynamicist

by Chris Hannon

Computational Fluid Dynamics is the calculation of the behaviour of a fluid, such as air. It calculates things like velocity, pressure and density, all using high performance computers. As no supersonic wind tunnels with moving roads exist, it is much cheaper to use CFD to design the external shape of Bloodhound. The picture on the right looks rather stunning, but is bad news aerodynamically - the colours indicate big changes of pressure all over the car!

by Ben Evans, Swansea University

Well, this is it, we have arrived, after almost 3 years of tireless design evolution at the shape that we believe can take us to 1,000mph – from my perspective this does indeed feel like discovering the Holy Grail.  Those of you who have been studying each configuration in our design journey will have become familiar with the ‘spot the difference’ game that seems to take place with each new vehicle shape.  In this article, I aim to guide you through the key aspects that have made ‘all the difference’.

The shape of BLOODHOUND SSC has evolved a long way from the original "Configuration 0" first thought up in August 2007. See the story of the configuration development here.

The iterative process that analyses each design, looks at what's good and what's bad, then feeds back into the subsequent design - and punctuated with occasional "eureka" moments - has finally settled on "Configuration 10" as the way forward ...

The design of BLOODHOUND SSC has undergone a thorough design development over the past 2 years. In this chart, we have captured the major changes that have occurred over this period, taking BLOODHOUND SSC from concept stage through to final design. Much of the exterior shape changes have been driven by the aerodynamic behaviour of each configuration predicted by the CFD team based at Swansea University.

Those of you who have been following the BLOODHOUND project closely will have noticed that there has been some hints recently that the BLOODHOUND SSC design team are looking at a new configuration in the engine room department. It is true that talk within the team is all about "RoJ" or "JoR", but what is that all about?

RoJ

RoJ is the acronym for "Rocket over Jet" and has been the prefered layout of the engines since BLOODHOUND SSC was conceived many months ago. The diagram above illustrates this configuration.

By Ron Ayers, (Aerodynamics and Performance)

by Ben Evans

Thrust2 and ThrustSSC were very successful cars - ThrustSSC went faster that the speed of sound in  1997, but only just!  BLOODHOUND SSC is designed to go well into the supersonic region:

The question of how we keep Andy Green safely pinned to the deck whilst travelling at almost 1.5 times the speed of sound is one that has been hanging over me for what seems like an eternity.

By Dr Ben Evans