ANALYSIS OF WALL HEAT TRANSFER IN ROTATING DETONATION ENGINES

Abstract

The rotating detonation engine (RDE) is a novel form of aeronautical propulsion that offers hopes of increased thermal efficiency over current forms of propulsion. This efficiency is gained by the use of the detonation cycle rather than the more commonly used Brayton cycle. This efficiency gain comes with distinct challenges in implementation due to sharp pressure and temperature increases as a result of the detonation process. Due to the dynamic fuel injection process, it was hypothesized that select injector geometries may inherently leave an unmixed oxidizer layer near the combustor walls of the RDE that may have potential benefits to reduce the heat transfer to the wall of the combustor and improve the thermal management of such systems. This hypothesis was investigated in this study through experimentation and computational modeling. It was found that a non-reactive layer of air does exist near the combustor walls for the injector investigated in this thesis from correlation of experimental and computational results. This layer showed the ability to reduce heat transfer to the combustor wall and should be considered during the RDE design process. Simple models for heat transfer were found to be useful for characterizing the phenomena observed in RDEs while decreasing computational time from fully reactive models.