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Successful flight testing of ISRO's Scramjet Engine Technology Demonstrator

By Swati Deshpande,

Added 29 August 2016

With this flight, critical technologies like 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.

The Scramjet engine designed by ISRO uses Hydrogen as fuel and the Oxygen from the atmospheric air as the oxidiser. Today's test was the maiden short duration experimental test of ISRO's Scramjet engine with a hypersonic flight at Mach 6. ISRO's Advanced Technology Vehicle (ATV), which is an advanced sounding rocket, was the solid rocket booster used for today's test of Scramjet engines at supersonic conditions.  ATV carrying Scramjet engines weighed 3277 kg at lift-off.

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.

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