Modeling a Combustion Chamber of a Pulse Detonation Engine

This paper presents the results of numerical simulation of a model combustion chamber of a pulse detonation engine using the authors’ developed software package. The main goal of the present study is to numerically investigate the effects of cyclic operation of pulse detonating chambers, as the former studies have been limited to simulating one cycle. To achieve this goal, a new mathematical model for heavy gas was applied simulating condensed fuel phase, which made it possible to accelerate computations and simulate multi-cycle operation of the device. Distributions of such characteristics as temperature, pressure, velocity, concentrations of reagents, intensity of reactions, and thrust force are obtained. A two-stage kinetic model of propellant combustion is proposed. Attention is paid to the main stages of PDE operation: filling of the chamber with reagents, ignition and transition to detonation, products exhaust, purification, and cooling the chamber with a neutral gas. The simulation of the working cycle with the shortest period for the specified system parameters was carried out, the execution time of each stage was obtained, and an assessment was carried out to minimize the main stages of the work cycle. Numerical results demonstrated that the characteristics of the engine cycle are stabilized already in the second cycle: the thrust in the first cycle differs from the thrust in the second by 5%, in the third from the second by 1%. Moreover, details of thrust dynamics in the second and third cycles were studied.