1,000mph Bloodhound car will need superwheel

The British Bloodhound car will need "bullet-proof wheels" when it tries to break the land speed record in 2012.

The 97kg aluminium discs that will act as its wheels will have to resist being blasted by a stream of grit thrown up from underneath the vehicle as it races across a dry lake bed at over 1,000mph.

Researchers are trying to identify the best alloy for the task.

This has resulted in them firing pieces of grit at samples of metal using a gas gun at Cambridge University.

It is a critical investigation. The discs will be spinning faster than any wheel in automotive history; at top speed, the wheels will turn at about 10,200rpm, or 170 complete turns each second.

This will produce stresses at the rim that could be as high as 150 megapascals (about 1.5 tonnes per square centimetre), says Dr Glenn Miles, from Lockheed Martin UK, who is leading this research.

"Surface damage to the wheels is inevitable because they will be in contact with the floor of the lake bed," he told BBC News.

"But what we don't want to see is that any cracks generated at the surface then flow through and into the wheel. If a crack travels into the wheel, we may see large-scale catastrophic failure or plastic collapse of the wheel, and that's something we've got to avoid at all costs."

To claim the land speed record, Bloodhound will have to better the mark of 763mph (1,228km/h) set by the Thrust SuperSonic Car in 1997. ...

via BBC News - 1,000mph Bloodhound car will need superwheel.