Aiming to boost India's space growth, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) has successfully built and tested India's first hypervelocity expansion tunnel test facility.
The institute has built a test platform for aerodynamic studies of space capsules and cruise missiles which fly through the Earth's atmosphere at hypersonic speeds of up to 10 km per second; this will help in the development of futuristic cruise missiles or space probes.
Hypersonic speed refers to speeds greater than the speed of sound, usually defined as speeds greater than Mach 5. Mach 5 is five times the speed of sound, or about 343 metres per second.
"The facility, named S2, is capable of generating flight speeds between 3-10 km/s, simulating the hypersonic conditions encountered during atmospheric entry of vehicles, asteroid entry, scramjet flights, and ballistic missiles," the institute's release reads.
The 24 metre long facility is called Jigarthanda, nicknamed S2, and is located at IIT Kanpur's Hypersonic Experimental Aerodynamics Laboratory (HEAL) in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. The S2 has been designed and developed indigenously over a period of three years.
In the future, the facility could be a valuable test bed for India's ongoing space and defence research missions such as Gaganyaan, RLV, hypersonic cruise missiles and many others.
The facility can also be used for the India-Russia collaboration to develop a long-range version of the Brahmos cruise missile.