Comment by jjk166
10 hours ago
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.
It doesn't paint a pretty picture tbh.
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.
[delayed]
> 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.
https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM
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.
No, that's not what he's telling us. Read it again
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.
> their engines are designed around frequent maintenance events. Powerplants, especially those for datacenters, need consistent uptime
Presumably they deploy multiple engines so they can stagger maintenance and not have a single point of failure.
> 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.
https://www.space.com/boom-supersonic-rolls-royce-engine-spl...