The facility is designed to provide air conditions representative of altitudes up to 30,000ft. This includes producing a vacuum of up to 0.3BarA and cooling the inlet air flow down to -50°C. The sub-atmospheric pressures are produced using a Vacuum ejector (Venturi). The inlet air is cooled using a heat exchanger with liquid nitrogen as a coolant. This rig provides a test section of 388mm diameter by 400mm length.
The facility is mainly used to conduct gas turbine altitude relight studies, on various combustor and injector configurations for sustainable aviation fuels, and assist with their certification. Moreover, under the Horizon Europe MINIMAL project the facility is being used to explore novel hydrogen combustion free-piston engine concepts. The test section of this facility is not limited to combustion experiments alone. It provides a general-purpose, sub-atmospheric chamber, which can be used to test equipment (i.e., batteries, electronics, avionics, radar) under partial vacuum conditions and subjected to a hostile environment, such as the unpressurised sections of an aircraft.
