German Test Facilities for High Speed Air Breathing Propulsion

Abstract

In combination with flight testing and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) schemes, ground based testing is a mandatory tool to be used in the design and development process of future air breathing propulsion systems. In fact it is the optimised combination of all three tools which is required to advance the knowledge in this field and to develop the database necessary for the development of operational highly integrated vehicles. In the present paper, the operational German ground based test capabilities for high speed air breathing propulsion are summarised. This overview is restricted to test facilities which allow testing including combustion and cold hypersonic tunnels which are used for intake, nozzle and fuel off combustor testing are not included. In the considered facilities, a broad variety of investigations ranging from fuel / oxidizer mixing, ignition, combustion and combustion instabilities to the testing of integrated systems consisting of intake, combustor and nozzle are performed.