The US is testing a supersonic drone to compete with China. Beijing claims to have reached Mach 16 – Video

The American company Venus Aerospace has announced that it has successfully tested a rotary detonation engine (RDE) on a small drone over the United States, reports Interesting Engineering.

The new engine promises hypersonic speeds, rivaling the efforts of other nations, such as China.

RDEs offer high thermodynamic efficiency and a compact design, which makes them promising for future propulsion systems. For this reason, various nations make sustained efforts to develop them.

China, for example, recently announced that it has developed one that could theoretically reach Mach 16. Japan has reported that it has made good progress with its RDE as early as 2021. Raytheon is also working with the US Agency for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to make one called “Gambit”.

RDEs work very differently from conventional engines, such as rockets. In a typical rocket engine, fuel and oxidizer are mixed and ignited in a combustion chamber to produce a powerful exhaust plume. RDEs work with the help of a detonation wave that moves around a circular channel.

This detonation wave is maintained by the injection of fuel and oxidizer, which produce a shock wave that travels outwards at supersonic speed. Like Raytheon, Venus Aerospace is collaborating with DARPA to develop a device for testing hypersonic technology.

The successful development of this engine would allow Venus to achieve excellent performance in a wide range of altitudes and speeds.

The test demonstrated the flight control, stability, telemetry and air launch of the rotary detonation rocket engine (RDRE) propulsion system.

“Using an air-launched platform and winged missile configuration allows us to cheaply and quickly reach the minimum viable test of our RDRE as a hypersonic engine. The team executed it professionally and has a lot of data to adjust for the next flight”, said technical director and co-founder Andrew Duggleby.

“This is how difficult things are done: step by step. Next comes RDRE flight and ultimately hypersonic flight, proving that RDRE is the engine that unlocks the hypersonic economy,” said Sarah Duggleby, CEO and co-founder.

Venus now plans to develop a larger, 3.7-meter test vehicle, which should be ready for testing by 2025. This larger platform should be capable of reaching Mach 4 or 5. Long-term goals Venus’ long-term goals are the development of a large Mach 9 vehicle and a Mach 2+ RDE-equipped commercial passenger aircraft.