Research Summaries

Back Coupling Performance of a Rotating Detonation Engine (RDE) Turbine System.

Fiscal Year 2017
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Investigator(s) Brophy, Christopher M.
Sponsor HyPerComp, Inc. (Other)
Summary NPS and HyPerComp will jointly explore the design and performance of a Rotating Detonation Engine (RDE)-Turbine system for the purpose of extracting work. The RDE engine utilizes detonation combustion and has the potential to deliver significantly higher thermodynamic cycle efficiency for over a deflagration combustion cycle. NPS has successfully operated RDE over the past five years. As this research of the combustion dynamics continues, one of the questions eluding this combustion cycle is the practical ability to extract work from this engine. One of the traditional methods for work extraction that interfaces well to the RDE architecture is the use of turbomachinery i.e. Ground based power generation. HyPerComp is one of the leading experts in computational fluid dynamics with the ability to model and help visualize the combustion dynamics of and resulting flow of the RDE. With these highly accurate models, a turbine has been designed to most efficiently extract work from the RDE. As this project has progressed, both NPS and HyPerComp have developed a method for the design of a turbine strictly for the RDE. Researchers will work on implementing the turbine blade design and evaluate this model to obtain measured data for validating the combustion models. This is revolutionary and has not been previously performed.
Keywords
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal