Pulsed detonation engines have the potential to provide thrust over a wide operating range for a fraction of the cost of conventional turbine engines. These promised returns have given rise to several vigorous research programs in academia, industry, and government labs. To capture the ultra-fast events comprising a detonation wave, researchers are forced to use megahertz range data acquisition...

Accurate computation of the evolution of a (typically curved) detonation front in a complex geometry, and of the state behind it, is a practical problem in the design of devices that use high-energy explosives. Direct numerical simulations are infeasible: accuracy demands high resolution of the smallest scale (the reaction zone), which is typically several orders of magnitude smaller than the d...

Thermonuclear explosions of Type Ia supernovae (SNIa) involve turbulent deflagrations, detonations, and possibly a deflagration-to-detonation transition. A phenomenological delayed detonation model of SNIa successfully explains many observational properties of SNIa including monochromatic light curves, spectra, brightness – decline and color – decline relations. Observed variations among SNia a...

We analyze the definition of the Gibbs free energy of a nanoparticle in a reactive fluid environment, and propose an approach for predicting the size of carbon nanoparticles produced by the detonation of carbon-rich explosives that regards their condensation as a nucleation process and takes into account absolute entropy effects of the cluster population. The results are consistent with experim...

The long-time behavior of the solution of the system θτ−απτ = Ω(θ), πτ−θτ = πξξ is investigated. Such a system is related to the modeling of detonation waves subjected to strong hydraulic resistance. We establish that some initial conditions yield decay (failure of ignition) while for other initial conditions our results strongly suggest convergence to traveling waves (successful ignition).

This paper reports an exploratory experimental cold flow test of the first mode in a multi-mode propulsion concept. A small model of a wallmounted pulse detonation rocket (PDR) ejecting into a duct was fabricated and integrated into the supersonic wind tunnel at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). Although supersonic testing proved to be inconclusive, the static tests showed that pulsed...

We investigate the brightness distribution expected for thermonuclear explosions that might result from the ignition of a detonation during the violent merger of white dwarf (WD) binaries. Violent WD mergers are a subclass of the canonical double degenerate scenario where two carbon-oxygen (CO) WDs merge when the larger WD fills its Roche-lobe. Determining their brightness distribution is criti...