Preliminary experimental study on solid-fuel rocket scramjet combustor

Abstract

Liquid or gaseous fuel scramjet technology has made great progress, and there has been some research attention to solid-fuel scramjet. A new scramjet configuration using solid fuel as propellant, namely solid-fuel rocket scramjet, is tested experimentally. It consists of two combustors. One is a rocket combustor used as gas generator, and the other is a supersonic combustor used for secondary combustion. The experiment simulates a flight Mach number of 4 at high altitude (stagnation temperature and pressure are 1170 K and 1.16 MPa, respectively), and metalized solid fuel is used as propellant. The results reveal that fuel-rich gas from the gas generator can burn with air in the supersonic combustor. Preliminary evaluation results show that the combustion efficiency of the propellant is about 90%, and the total pressure recovery coefficient in the supersonic combustor is about 0.6. These results indicate that the configuration of solid-fuel rocket scramjet is feasible.