R&D on Hydrocarbon-fueled RBCC Engines for a TSTO Launch Vehicle

Abstract

Combination of a air-breathing engines and rocket engines (termed as Rocket Based Combined Cycle engine) gives an opportunity to reduce onboard oxygen consumption and to increase system weight margins for various application from cruiser to launch vehicles. For launch vehicle applications, combination of a ramjet/scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) flow-pass with embedded rocket engines was proposed (termed as Rocket-Ramjet Combined Cycle engine, T. Kanda, et. al., JPP, 19(2003), 859), and related R&D activities are undergoing at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Kakuda Space Center targeting hydrogen as the fuel due to its high Isp and cooling performances. Use of hydrogen fuel, on the other hand, can be costly due to the fuel cost and difficult-to-handle nature of liquefied hydrogen. Thus, hydrocarbon fuel such as ethanol was under consideration for the application to the future reusable launch vehicles termed as the ‘reference system,’ targeting manned operation to LEO. This presentation is to show the status of system analysis, flight demonstration plan, and related research efforts.