Design, Manufacturing, and Testing of a Small Through-Flow Wave Rotor for Use within the Brayton Cycle

Abstract

With the ever growing popularity of drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles for military, commercial, and private usage, their is a desire to improve performance in terms of range, altitude, and flight speed. Current technology uses either electric motors or internal combustion engines: both piston and jet engine types. These sorts of engines undergo significant efficiency degradation as their size decreases. A possible solution to this is to change these physics to something more immune to scaling losses; a pressure exchange device known as a wave rotor does just that. A wave rotor operates via oscillating pressure waves in order to compress the gas as opposed to the mechanical compression utilized by conventional.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 16, 2016
Accession Number
AD1054254

Entities

People

  • Michael J. Mcclearn

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Boundary Layer
  • Calorific Value
  • Chemistry
  • Climate Change
  • Combustion Products
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Energy Transfer
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Gas Turbines
  • Heat Transfer
  • Jet Engines
  • Manufacturing
  • Pressure Measurement
  • Standing Waves
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Readers

  • Economics
  • Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) Technology.
  • Plasma Physics / Magnetohydrodynamics

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy