The Swiss start-up, which is developing a hydrogen-powered supersonic aircraft, believes it has reached a new milestone. It has carried out encouraging ground tests with its turbojet engine.

The company has adapted a General Electric commercial paraffin turbojet engine to run on hydrogen gas. Several test sessions were carried out in April and June at the company’s facilities in Payerne, Switzerland. These successfully ignited the engine and achieved acceleration of up to 45% under stable conditions. The team observed that the reactor remained stable despite repeated ignitions. The results were in line with the calculations.

A video extract of these tests can be seen here.

The next stage in the Destinus schedule is a series of idle stabilisation tests to characterise the temperature and pressure distributions in the combustor and throughout the turbine subsystem. The team aims to continue ramping up to maximum take-off thrust by the fourth quarter. This phase will require further modifications to the propulsion and oil cooling systems.

These tests are essential to validate the technologies developed in-house and to understand how the system behaves with hydrogen as the sole fuel source, both in terms of combustion and the fuel system. This information is crucial for developing related systems and tests, such as the cryogenic LH2 or a hydrogen afterburner specially designed for the Destinus-3 demonstrator.

Do you want to learn more about Switzerland and hydrogen? You can read our latest articles on the country here.