I spent years working in aerospace turbines. This is BS. Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate.
There is no technological difference between boom's engine and conventional jet turbines. It is still a subsonic turbine, it just happens to sit behind a diffuser that slows the air from supersonic to subsonic speeds. Genuine supersonic turbines are a radically different, and much less efficient, technology. Turbines for supersonic propulsion are actually more temperature sensitive and less efficient than those for subsonic applications specifically because they need to prevent more heating in the compression stages to keep their combustion chambers stable.
The other talking points are likewise bogus. The problem with aeroderivative turbines is maintenance - planes need to be high performance and don't stay up in the air for very long, so their engines are designed around frequent maintenance events. Powerplants, especially those for datacenters, need consistent uptime, not good power to weight ratios.
Boom isn't doing anything special in terms of materials or data monitoring. Yes, power turbines have been a thing for decades, and in those decades they have been arguably the most advanced machines humans have built industrially at any given time. Going back to the maintenance thing, turns out people really want to know if there's an issue before their $200 million machine fails.
I like Boom, I have friends working for Boom. I presume this is just an elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon. I get it, but it's still ugly to see. I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
> elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon ... hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
their current goal might already be "failing" (as in, lack of real demand for hypersonic travel). Investment getting hard to obtain means they're looking for more/broader investment from other investors. Thus, the hopping on of the AI bandwagon.
That's what I was thinking, if they have an engine design, I can imagine (uninformed armchair opinion) it's easier to build a power generator than a plane around it.
Another red-flag to me is the diagram labeling "proprietary superalloys". This implies more than one new metal composition, which by definition is unproven? So a new metal, in a new engine, in a new airplane.
Add to that the "titanium" lable. Nothing is pure titanium. It is all alloys, most of which are "proprietary". Inconsistant technical terminology within a diagram is a huge red flag imho.
>> Legacy turbines need huge quantities of water for cooling to avoid thermal derate in hot environments
Yup. Turbine-powered helicopters famously haul big tanks of water around when flying in hot environments. Heat is a problem, not a game changer.
Yeah 100% on the same page. I wrote a detailed comment here but I left out my intuition around supersonic being less efficient. Thanks for weighing in. TBO is a huge factor and the post relies on the readers naivete around that and other factors. But mainly replying because I agree that it's an ugly look to hop onto the bandwagon like this. Especially in aerospace.
The deeper BS is that there is no engine. People remember the XB-1 demonstrator flying and assume that Boom is farther along than they really are. The XB-1 had off-the-shelf GE engines.
As far as I am aware even China hasn't mass produced commercial jet engines yet so the idea that Boom have one that works and can be mass produced seems highly unlikely. We'll see though I would be interested in London to New York in 3.5h, but I'm guessing the flights will be for the richest people only.
Rich people seem to spend a lot of times in helicopters and private planes, which is dramatically more dangerous than commercial air travel.
I could off the top of my head name a few rich people that died from it. Hell, the titan submersible, while a very different animal, is a pretty clear indicator that vast wealth doesn't preclude a willingness to risk one's life in highly experimental "travel"
Maybe not the richest of people, but there's a significant amount of people who got their wealth due to their love/acceptance of risk. Climbing Everest is not cheap, is still very risky, and I presume it is more expensive than a cross-Atlantic trip on these jets.
Sure, but the main risk they'd be accepting here is that of spending an inordinate amount of time hanging around in an airport terminal waiting for a broken engine to be fixed.
It'd be hard to spin that as being anything like as heroic as the risk of being killed or maimed whilst climbing Everest!
And they want comfort. A 5-hour flight sleeping on a flat bed is a thousand times better than an economy seat on a 3-hour flight. Part of concorde's problem was the rising expectations of first class travel in the 90s. It was never going to be compatable with today's huge first class seats.
> the idea that Boom have one that works and can be mass produced seems highly unlikely.
Booms claim is they're developing and will some day real soon have "one that works" and then it can be produced at a low-enough cost in sufficient quantity.
> Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate
What could be contributing to this is recently Vertasium did a whole video on how jet engines operate at temperatures above their components melting point.
And how the cold air at altitude is what keeps it from melting.
> I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
IDK, the first sign to me that Boom weren't likely to succeed was when Rolls Royce parted ways on engine development (1). Were the engines not technically feasible? Not economically feasible? Didn't believe in Boom's business model? We don't know Rolls Royce's thinking, but it's a vote of no confidence.
Taking it in house seemed like a last resort - designing "a new engine in a new airframe" is a known risk. A homebrew engine can't be benefit.
They don't even have the engine: Re-purposing the hypothetical jet engines as hypothetical LLM power plants seems like a nosedive, really.
I'd assume it was because Boom wanted more collaboration and offered less margins than the current customers of DoD super secret planes. Why work harder, longer hours on someone else's idea for less money?
I also notice they don't mention the noise profile of these plants. Putting a stationary engine like that will make an insane amount of noise, and even enclosed will change the soundscape for miles around, affecting everything from human well-being to animals' ability to communicate. Not cool.
But maybe they aren't really thinking about that because it is nowhere near being done.
Gas turbine power generation is already a thing. For example 20% of UK grid power right now comes from "combined cycle gas turbines" - which are a very efficient way to turn natural gas into electricity. They've solved the noise issue for those plants.
Um, noise mitigation is still an issue at existing gas plants (e.g., [0-3]) and often only partially dealt with by local regulations, and this group are claiming their engine is substantially different, supersonic vs subsonic, and crossing that threshold usually involves large noise generation effects.
You're telling us that data centers are more sensitive to downtime than airplanes??? That makes no sense.
All of the aeroderivatives were designed in the 70's before we had computer modeling to help optimize the designs. It's not that crazy to assume that we can design a better and more efficient turbine today with all of the help of modern technology.
Planes are quite sensitive to engine failure during flight. Data centers don’t tend to fly for three hours then sit idle for an hour, then sit idle overnight. They need to be up 24/7. When you’re talking 40 or 50 megawatts, you’re not going to necessarily buy triple or quadruple capacity. So it’d better be reliable without a lot of downtime for checks and maintenance.
> All of the aeroderivatives were designed in the 70's before we had computer modeling to help optimize the designs.
Not even remotely correct. The concept started in the 70s, and designs have been continuously improved, using the latest modelling techniques, for the last 50 years. Modern turbines are some of the most optimized machines humanity has ever produced.
There is no technological difference between boom's engine and conventional jet turbines. It is still a subsonic turbine, it just happens to sit behind a diffuser that slows the air from supersonic to subsonic speeds. Genuine supersonic turbines are a radically different, and much less efficient, technology. Turbines for supersonic propulsion are actually more temperature sensitive and less efficient than those for subsonic applications specifically because they need to prevent more heating in the compression stages to keep their combustion chambers stable.
The other talking points are likewise bogus. The problem with aeroderivative turbines is maintenance - planes need to be high performance and don't stay up in the air for very long, so their engines are designed around frequent maintenance events. Powerplants, especially those for datacenters, need consistent uptime, not good power to weight ratios.
Boom isn't doing anything special in terms of materials or data monitoring. Yes, power turbines have been a thing for decades, and in those decades they have been arguably the most advanced machines humans have built industrially at any given time. Going back to the maintenance thing, turns out people really want to know if there's an issue before their $200 million machine fails.
I like Boom, I have friends working for Boom. I presume this is just an elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon. I get it, but it's still ugly to see. I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.