Combustion Characteristics in Rotating Detonation Engines

Toroidal Imploding Detonation Wave Initiator for Pulse Detonation Engines

Imploding toroidal detonation waves were used to initiate detonations in propane–air and ethylene–air mixtures inside of a tube. The imploding wave was generated by an initiator consisting of an array of channels filled with acetylene–oxygen gas and ignited with a single spark. The initiator was designed as a low-drag initiator tube for use with pulse detonation engines. To detonate hydrocarbon...

Internal Combustion Engines

Transient combustion control of internal combustion engines

This thesis addresses the problem of combustion control for automotive engines. A method is proposed to complement existing controllers, which use lookup tables based on steady-state operation. During transients, the new control method adjusts fast control variables (ignition or injection time) to compensate for deviations in the cylinder initial conditions from their optimal values due to the ...

Ethanol Internal Combustion Engines

Ethanol Internal Combustion Engines HIGHLIGHTS PROCESS AND TECHNOLOGY STATUS – The use of biofuels (e.g. bio-ethanol and biodiesel) in the transport sector can save significant amounts of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Internal combustion engines (ICEs) can run on bio-ethanol manufactured from biomass or waste through biochemical processes. Agricultural feedstock such as sugar...

Multidisciplinary Study of Pulse Detonation Engines

Research at the Explosion Dynamics Laboratories at Caltech over the past three years under an ONR contract has examined many issues critical to Pulse Detonation Engine (PDE) development. These include: fundamental and applied studies of detonation initiation; detonation cell width measurements to characterize fuels, including JP10; visualization of the reaction zone structure of propagating det...