Supermathematics Is Behind the Superspeed of Bloodhound

September 24, 2009

Called the Bloodhound project, it aims to take a car to a velocity of 1,000 miles per hour. Computational scientist Ben Evans is involved in the car's design and shape, and its driver will be Andy Green, a Royal Air Force fighter pilot and Oxford mathematics graduate. Green holds the current land speed record, 763 miles per hour, set in 1997.

To overcome drag of 12 tons per square meter, computational fluid dynamics is used to "divide" the space surrounding the car into an enormous assortment of "elements"—100,000 million in all. Each element represents a minute contribution to overall air density, velocity, temperature, and pressure on the vehicle. Integration, which sums the effects of pressure over the vehicle, helps to unravel the total forces at play. It's akin, Evans wrote in Plus magazine, to employing the trapezium rule, which estimates the area under a curve by approximating it by trapezia, and then summing the areas.

"By combining the predicted aerodynamic forces with the anticipated weight of the vehicle and the predicted thrust from Bloodhound's jet and rocket propulsion system, we are able to predict exactly how the car will behave," Evans said. He indicated that Bloodhound would cover 10 miles in 90 seconds, reaching a peak acceleration of +2.5g, and increasing by 60 mph every second. At its top speed it would cover a mile in 3.5 seconds.

"None of this would be possible without the use of mathematics," Evans said. “As things stand, the maths tells us that 1,000 mph is possible."

Source: Plus, September 2009.