India to test ramjet engine
The competition heats up: India plans to test an experimental air-breaking scramjet rocket engine sometime next week.
The article provides almost no details about the August 28 test, including whether it is a static fire test on the ground or will be flown.
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The competition heats up: India plans to test an experimental air-breaking scramjet rocket engine sometime next week.
The article provides almost no details about the August 28 test, including whether it is a static fire test on the ground or will be flown.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
The first sentence of the article contains the answer:
“The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is readying to conduct air-breathing propulsion experiment next week using its RH-560 rocket fitted with a supersonic combustion ramjet (Scramjet) engine.”
Scramjets have to be moving at Mach 4 – 5 before they start working. American scramjet tests have achieved speeds of up to Mach 10. India is doing what we have always done when testing scramjets; using a rocket to boost the test article up to operating speed.
There really isn’t any alternative. There are very few wind tunnels anywhere that can generate flows in the Mach 4 – 10 range. None of them can do so for more than a second. That’s a useful duration for testing shapes and structures, but one needs sustained airflow to test engines.
One also needs the flow to be actual air. The best hypersonic wind tunnel in the U.S. is Hypervelocity Wind Tunnel 9 in Silver Spring, MD. It can generate flow speeds up to Mach 16, but the flows are pure nitrogen.
Hypersonic wind tunnel flows are hot as well as fast. One supposes that using actual air would likely result in the oxygen and nitrogen combusting into various oxides of nitrogen. Not a good environment in which to test anything dependent on any other form of combustion.