Beehive Industries completes high-altitude testing of Frenzy engine, looks toward flight trials

Beehive Industries' Frenzy engine undergoing high-altitude testing. (Beehive Industries)

Beehive Industries announced on 8 December that it had completed high-altitude testing for its 200 lbf Frenzy engine.

“The high-altitude test campaign, conducted at a government test facility in Ohio, validates Frenzy's performance and capability across the full flight envelope. With this success, Beehive has completed altitude testing on schedule and is preparing to scale production to meet surging customer demand,” according to a company statement.

During the trials, the Frenzy engines demonstrated “successful ignition and operation across the flight envelope; rapid acceleration from light-off to 100% engine speed; turbine temperatures and thrust-specific fuel consumption better than predicted; [and] ‘like new' hardware condition after mission-life equivalent run-time”, the statement said.

The high-altitude trials, completed “a little over a month ago”, were designed to quantify the effects of altitude on the engines, Gordie Follin, chief product officer for Beehive Industries, told Janes on 8 December, noting that engines generally produce less thrust as altitude increases.

Small engines are typically more sensitive to altitude, he continued. “One of the bigger risks for a small engine is when you take it to altitude, it doesn't have the same operability, which means if you change the throttle, it may stall out, or it may not perform how you expect or worse, you might have a hard time starting it at altitude,” he said.

“We simulated beyond the highest altitude that [Frenzy] would see in real performance. We were able to go up to 35,000 ft of altitude, and then we tested starting and operability all the way up to those conditions,” Follin explained.

“We exceeded all of our contractual requirements. The engine started faster, [and] it started to a higher altitude,” he added.