Agnilet Semi-Cryogenic installed in the 1st stage of the Agnikul rocket

Homegrown space tech start up, Agnikul Cosmos, on Wednesday, announced it has secured patent for the design and manufacturing of its single-piece rocket engines from the Government of India.

In a press release, the IIT-Madras-based start-up said, one such single piece engine, 'Agnilet' is the world's first single-piece 3D printed rocket engine fully designed and manufactured in India and successfully test-fired in early 2021.

Agnilet has been designed in such a manner so as to encapsulate all of these into just one piece of hardware and has zero assembled parts. Agnikul showcased this engine at IAC 2021, Dubai, which is the most prestigious space tech gathering in the world, the release added.

"Rocket engines usually have thousands of parts in them - starting from injectors that inject fuel into the engine, to the cooling channels that cool the engine, to the igniter that is necessary to ignite the propellants. Designing Agnilet as a single piece of hardware has not been an easy ride, but our team has proved it to be otherwise," Srinath Ravichandran, Co-founder & CEO, Agnikul Cosmos, said in the release.

"This patent is a testament to the world-class designed-in-India and made-in-India deep-tech engineering that the Agnikul team is able to do," he added.