What is it about?
Scramjet engines, capable of operating in hypersonic speeds five or more times the speed of sound, are a viable alternative to conventional rockets in access to space. However, its supersonic combustion process is still not fully understood. Our experiments provide further insight into the combustion process, showing it is highly complex and more multifaceted than subsonic combustion.
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Why is it important?
More and more, people are investing to make access to space cheaper. The main technology used for that is the rocket engine. But there is a potential candidate to substitute rockets in at least part of the trajectory: scramjets. There are airbreathing engines capable of flight in the hypersonic regime, five or more times the speed of sound. But to achieve that is difficult and the engine needs to be very efficient. To make more efficient engines, we need better understanding of its processes, in particular the supersonic combustion process. This is what we do in this paper: a thorough investigation of the combustion process in a realistic scramjets engine, which can hopefully lead us to better models and better engines.
Perspectives
Getting these results was not easy and I'm glad I had excellent people to help me along the way. To be able to see the combustion process within a millisecond of flow time is quite something. That the results corroborate previous suspicions that were had about the complexity of scramjet combustion is a bonus.
Augusto Moura
Avibras
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Characterization of Supersonic Turbulent Combustion in a Mach-10 Scramjet Combustor, AIAA Journal, May 2020, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/1.j058671.
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