Rocket engine testing lies at the heart of China's space development plans, as the country ramps up innovation efforts to serve growing space exploration needs and ever-richer civil application scenarios of relevant technologies.
At a major test site in Xi'an, northwestern province of Shaanxi, engineers are preparing an engine for testing that will power reusable rockets.
The new facilities aim to halve test times to just two days, up from five previously.
"Rocket engine works in a very, very harsh environment. In order to perfectly test the correct performance of our engine, the first testbed must not go wrong, the testbed itself must be absolutely reliable," said Gao Qiang, staff member of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country's major space contractor. Each engine design is put through rigorous testing, referred to as "non-flying launches", to demonstrate and fine-tune its performance before use in an actual flight.
With China aiming to ramp up its annual tests to 300 engines by 2025 to support emerging industries, the need for efficient, repetitious engine screening platform is greater than ever.
The upgraded Xi'an facility can now simultaneously evaluate up to four engines, dramatically boosting assessment capacity.
"Engine is a core support of our space launch missions which serves as a cornerstone. You have to make reliable engines to meet all the requirements, so as to support the healthy, rapid development of the space industry," said Li Bin, deputy head of the Sixth Academy of CASC.
The same fuel combustion expertise driving rocket development is also powering civilian industries through adapted gasifier designs. One CASC subsidiary leverages the technology to cleanly and efficiently turn coal into vital chemicals and synthetic fuels.
"It (the gasifier) adopts a space pulverized coal pressurized gasification technology developed from the combustion, heat transfer system of rocket engines based on systems engineering theory, and is a civilian application of aerospace liquid rocket engine technology. Rockets need to be fully burned, but ours is anaerobic oxygen combustion, which brings precise control of oxygen and gasification raw materials," said Zhao Feng, general manager of Changzheng Engineering's Cangzhou branch.
The dire-needed technology has been monopolized by foreign countries. There are so many types of coal in China that the gasification characteristics of each type of coal need to be studied in order to succeed in this technology.
By far, the gasifier project team has established more than 600 types of coal gasification characteristics database and coal gasification enterprise standards.
Chemical plants have signed 155 gasifiers with CASC, the total contract value of the contract has exceeded 20 billion yuan (2.75 billion U.S. dollars), and the investment of upstream and downstream industries has exceeded 300 billion yuan.
In the company's remote service center in Beijing, the real-time operation status of the gasifiers across the country are shown on monitor screens.
"Each gasifier has more than 2,000 real-time data, which are very valuable for the research and development of new technologies. The annual GDP of the coal chemical industry is more than one trillion yuan, so we must develop core technologies and make the industry clean and efficient to ensure high-quality development. In the future, the industry may also enter some environmental protection fields to meet our future carbon neutrality needs," said Jiang Congbin, chairman of Changzheng Engineering Co., Ltd.
Reliable rocket engine pushes China's space ambitions, inspires wide application
