ROCKET ENGINEERING
Airborne Engineering Ltd has over 7 years experience working on test programmes for solid, hybdrid and bi-propellant rockets. We can design and manufacture test hardware including propellant supply systems, control gear, instrumentation and data acquisition. We also offer data reduction & analysis services and can manage test operations and safety procedures if required. Tests are conducted at the customer's site or our own secure facility which offers horizontal or vertical testing of engines up to 10KN thrust. We can also arrange high altitude test chamber facilities for smaller engines.
Project STERN
Project STERN is a hydrogen fuelled, air-breathing rocket engine designed and developed by Reaction Engines Limited, to provide data which can be used for the engines on the SKYLON spaceplane - the SABREs, and to provide data for the SCIMITAR engine for the LAPCAT Mach 5 transport aircraft.
The STERN engine makes use of an E-D nozzle, an altitude compensating nozzle that ensures the rocket nozzle is at optimum efficiency from the Earth's surface all the way to space.
Airborne Engineering is responsible for the operational testing of the STERN rocket engine. The testing is designed to evaluate the practical performance of the E-D nozzle, and to analyse the wake field downstream of the E-D nozzle.
The Canary Sounding Rocket
The Canary sounding rocket is a reuseable sub-orbital sounding rocket designed by Airborne Engineering in collaboration with Reaction Engines Limited, to investigate the performance of an E-D nozzle rocket engine at speeds of up to Mach 5, and to analyse the wake field downstream of an E-D nozzle under flight conditions.
Rocket camera platforms
Airborne Engineering Ltd has been involved in a research programme into investigating the use of off-the-shelf military rocket motors for use as camera platforms. One of the possible applications of this programme was to develop a rocket system which could be launched from the QinetiQ-1 balloon for taking pictures of the balloon at the edge of the atmosphere.
Such a free-flying rocket platform, while cheap, is not very flexible, so Airborne Engineering Ltd is developing an actively stabilised camera platform based on hybrid rocket technology. The control system has been demonstrated using expendable solid motors and a coaxial hybrid engine has been tested. The next step is the integration of these technologies into a "hovering" camera platform.