Design and Testing of a Water-Cooled Center Body in a Small Scale Rotating Detonation Engine
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
1-2026
Abstract
Small scale Rotating Detonation Engines (RDEs) lend themselves to preliminary materials testing since they require smaller amounts of potentially unproven test materials. However, proper testing of high performance materials necessitates the ability to run for longer durations. This work details the development and testing of a water cooled center body to enable long duration runs with novel outer bodies on a "micro" 28 mm outer diameter RDE. Designed based on published RDE heat flux data and modeling via thermal resistance equations, this cooled center body has shown success in all tests to date. Many runs over a minute have been completed, with one run reaching 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Visible damage beyond discoloration has yet to be observed. Calorimetry data obtained from these tests show a maximum heat flux into the center body of 10.6 MW/m2. At similar run conditions, decreasing coolant flow rate was found to yield a lower heat flux while running with a richer equivalence ratio yielded a higher heat flux even at a lower coolant mass flow.
Source Publication
AIAA SCITECH 2026 Forum
Recommended Citation
Edward D. Blaney, Frederick R. Schauer, Scott W. Theuerkauf, Brian C. Sell and Christopher A. Stevens. "Design and Testing of a Water-Cooled Center Body in a Small Scale Rotating Detonation Engine," AIAA 2026-2879. AIAA SCITECH 2026 Forum. January 2026.
Comments
The full conference paper is accessible by subscription or purchase from AIAA using the DOI link below.
Conference Session: Innovations in Engine Design: Advances in Composites, Detonations, and Aerodynamics