I did the design calculations on Art Arfons centrifuge. Arfons had a 2g car, so I sized the centrifuge to generate 3g, using a 30 foot arm turning 15 rpm.
So YOU designed Art's centrifuge...
You're far more experienced than I thought and older too!
Go work for a race team and get some experience to go with all of that literature. The only issue is that you may have to be a little more humble when it's someone else's car and life on the line.
Many of the rest of us have bet our lives (literally) on our work. Does that make us better than those that haven't?
Yes, it darn well does.
http://www.landracing.com/forum/index.php/topic,4008.15.html(Eric) "The 21% empty weight fraction and the attending ~10% structural fraction for a 1500 to 2000 psf vehicle are more than a factor of 2 away from being rational.
This is a difficulty that I have run into with a lot of the people "designing" ALSR cars. Stresses are factors of 4 to 6 greater than any wheel driven car, 10X for Mach 2. Think about that factor of 10 very carefully. The design database of supersonic-at-sea-level capable aircraft and missiles provides plenty of structural weight and design guidance that simply cannot be ignored.
If anyone wants to pencil out something like this, a 1000 mph FIA record requires a 35 to 40% structural mass fraction with advanced materials, straight load paths, and good structural design. Poor design or heavy materials can raise this to 60 to 75%. Note that the "structural" mass fraction does not include the engine.
For reference, the structural fraction of our current project is nearly 60% due to the use of mild steel and a far-from-optimum structural layout. Thrust SSC was about 50%. 10% is irrational."
(Franklin) "The recoverable reuseable solid rocket boosters on the shuttle each weigh about 100,000 lbs empty and 1,000,000 lbs loaded. That's nine times the structure weight in propellant. The steam rocket car would only need to hold about three times the structure weight in propellant.
With a weight of about 7.5 lbs per square foot for 3/16" steel sheet, a tank 25 feet long and 2 feet in diameter would have about 1,180.125 lbs of steel in its skin. Don't know what the weight from the end caps would be. So with the configuration of three 25 foot long 2 foot diameter tanks I described earlier, the steam rocket car using steel tanks would have about 3,540.375 lbs of steel in the tank skins (about the same weight as a J-79 engine). Using titanium instead of steel for the tanks would cut the tank weight in half. If titanium instead of steel were used for the tanks, the 4,000 lbs empty weight used in Craig Farnsworth's performance calculations would be attainable and very realistic."