On the Use of Standing Oblique Detonation Waves in a Shcramjet Combustor

The shock-induced combustion ramjet (shcramjet) is a hypersonic airbreathing propulsion concept which over-comes the drawbacks of the long, massive combustors present in the scramjet by using a standing oblique detonation wave (a coupled shock-combustion front) as a means of nearly instantaneous heat addition. A novel shcramjet combustor design that makes use of wedge-shaped flameholders to avoid detonation wave-wall interactions is proposed and analyzed with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations in this study. The laminar, two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations coupled with a non-equilibrium hydrogen-air combustion model based on chemical kinetics are used to represent the physical system. The equations are solved with the WARP (window-allocatable resolver for propulsion) CFD code (see: Parent, B. and Sislian, J. P., “The Use of Domain Decomposition in Accelerating the Convergence of Quasihyperbolic Systems”, J. of Comp. Physics, Vol. 179, No. 1,2002, pages 140-169). The solver was validated with experimental results found in the literature. A series of steady-state numerical simulations was conducted using WARP and it was deter-mined by means of thrust potential calculations that this combustor design is a viable one for shcramjet propulsion: assuming a shcramjet flight Mach number of twelve at an altitude of 36,000 m, the geometrical dimensions used for the combustor give rise to an operational range for combustor inlet Mach numbers between six and eight. Different shcramjet flight Mach numbers would require different combustor dimensions and hence a variable geometry system in or-der to be viable.