Chinese new 120-tonne high-thrust rocket engine test firing successes

2012-07-29 (China Military News by China-defense-mashup) — Long March-V will make its first flight in 2014. Before the first flight, the rocket engine still needs times of testing under extremely harsh conditions to test the stability and reliability of rocket engines. On July 29, a new 120-tonne liquid oxygen/kerosene high-thrust rocket engine for Long March-V will accept high temperature and high-speed of 3000 ℃ for 200 seconds per minute with nearly twenty thousand rpm test.

According to the reporter, the test location is a test platform in small col, which is 50 km south of the Xi’an, Shaanxi Province. The testing platform is the largest rocket engine testing plant in China and the Asia. It can test rocket engine  stand-alone thrust of 500 tons.

At 3:00 p.m. on the 28th, the staff has started the engine liquid fuel filling. Where a pipeline is filling liquid oxygen. The liquid oxygen engine ignition of the oxidizers, liquid oxygen temperature reaches minus 180 ° C, filling the pipeline has been closed on the cream. Another pipeline is filling the engine’s fuel kerosene. The staff will be the engine to raise 30 tons of kerosene and 98 tons of liquid oxygen filling lasted 30 minutes.

According to reports, the engine is three meters high and weighs 1.9 tons, stand-alone thrust of 120 tons. Comparing with Long March II F single rocket thrust of 75 tons, the new engine increased by 60% or more than the stand-alone thrust of the Long March II F rocket, it is Chinese largest single thrust engine.

The 120-tonne liquid oxygen/kerosene high-pressure staged combustion cycle engine will provide an effective guarantee for the country’s manned space and lunar probe missions, said the State Administration of Science,Technology and Industry for National Defence.

The high-performance engine is non-toxic, pollution-free and reliable.

It boasts 120 tonnes of thrust, making it much more powerful than the 75-tonne-thrust engines of launch vehicles for the already-launched Shenzhou spacecraft, but still far from the 670 tonnes of thrust the United States’ F-1 engine boasts, and farther still from 740 tonnes of thrust of Russia’s RD-170 engine.

It is the first kind of high-pressure staged combustion cycle engine for which China has proprietary intellectual property rights, said the administration.

It also makes China the second country in the world, after Russia, to grasp the core technologies for a liquid oxygen/kerosene high-pressure staged combustion cycle rocket engine.

The research project for the engine was initiated in September 2000.

It was coordinated and organized by the State Administration of Science,Technology and Industry for National Defence, and conducted by the Academy of Aerospace Propulsion Technology of China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation.

Researchers made more than 70 technical breakthroughs in designing, manufacturing and testing, and obtained nearly 20 national defense scientific and technical achievements along with patent licenses. They also worked on nearly 50 kinds of new material.

According to a government white paper issued at the end of last year, China will develop next-generation launch vehicles, including the Long March-5, Long March-6 and Long March-7, in the 2011-2015 period.

The Long March-5 will use a non-toxic and pollution-free propellant, and will be capable of placing a 25-tonne payload into near-Earth orbit, or placing a 14-tonne payload into geostationary orbit.