Bloodhound SSC

The BLOODHOUND Project is largely a virtual company, with a small design office in Bristol. The majority of the staff work from their homes and do not commute.

The Bloodhound Project will be able to teach, demonstrate and build understanding of the careful use and management of energy. If it is to achieve its target speed, the BLOODHOUND SSC vehicle will be have to be the most fuel-efficient Mach 1.4 manned vehicle.

The Bloodhound vehicle is powered by two power plants:

A EuroJet EJ200 jet engine as used in the Typhoon aircraft. The EJ200 is one of the smallest and most powerful military engines of its type. The engine burns small volumes of standard jet fuel, as used in commercial airliners. BLOODHOUND SSC will use a maximum of 200-250 kg of jet fuel on its high speed runs.

The other power plant is a hybrid rocket motor, which is used for a very short burn time (20secs) to accelerate the car to its peak speed. The fuel pump for the rocket motor is driven by an V-12 petrol engine and, given the short duration of the rocket burn, it is unlikely that the V-12 will burn more than 5 litres of petrol per run.

The rocket motor uses High Test Peroxide (HTP) as the oxidiser and HTPB, an aromatic rubber substance, as the fuel. The rocket will be used for many of the early runs using peroxide alone as a monopropellant, which decomposes to produce steam and oxygen (up to 230 kilogrammes of oxygen per run) and no CO2 emissions.

During later high speed runs the rocket will burn most of the 180 kg of HTPB and generate up to 400kg of CO2 for each run.

The first piece of data they open sourced is the Vehicle Technical Specification .This detailed document makes up Part one of the car’s ‘genome’, Part two, the CAD design files will be published by the Autumn as stated here.