India became the fourth nation to test an air-breathing Scramjet engine, with the successful flight testing on Sunday Aug 28 from Satish...
India became the fourth nation to test an air-breathing Scramjet engine, with the successful flight testing on Sunday Aug 28 from Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota.
The test is a modest yet important milestone achieved by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in its endeavour to design and develop advanced air breathing engines including engines for ISRO’s future space transportation system.
After a smooth countdown of 12 hours, the solid rocket booster carrying the two Scramjet Engines, lifted off at 0600 hrs (6:00 am) IST. The important flight events, namely, burn out of booster rocket stage, ignition of second stage solid rocket, functioning of Scramjet engines for 5 seconds followed by burn out of the second stage took place exactly as planned.
The Advanced Technology Vehicle (ATV), which is an advanced sounding rocket along with the Scramjet engines weighed 3277 kg at lift-off and reached a hypersonic speed of Mach 6 during the flight.
After a flight of about 300 seconds, the vehicle touched down in the Bay of Bengal, approximately 320 km from Sriharikota. The vehicle was successfully tracked during its flight from the ground stations at Sriharikota.
With this flight, critical technologies such as ignition of air breathing engines at supersonic speed, holding the flame at supersonic speed, air intake mechanism and fuel injection systems have been successfully demonstrated.
ATV is a two stage spin stabilised launcher with identical solid motors (based on Rohini RH560 sounding rocket) as the first as well as the second stage (booster and sustainer). The twin Scramjet engines were mounted on the back of the second stage.
Once the second stage reached the desired conditions for engine “Start-up”, necessary actions were initiated to ignite the Scramjet engines and they functioned for about 5 seconds. Today’s ATV flight operations were based on a pre-programmed sequence.
Some of the technological challenges handled by ISRO during the development of Scramjet engine include the design and development of Hypersonic engine air intake, the supersonic combustor, development of materials withstanding very high temperatures, computational tools to simulate hypersonic flow, ensuring performance and operability of the engine across a wide range of flight speeds, proper thermal management and ground testing of the engines.
