Explosive discovery by Beijing scientists
Researchers build new type of rocket engine powered by shock waves from blasts
A research team in Beijing says they have built a new type of rocket engine powered by explosions.
The continuous rotating detonation combustion engine, developed by Professor Wang Bing and colleagues from the school of aerospace engineering in Tsinghua University in Beijing, is driven by explosive shock waves spinning like a tornado faster than the speed of sound.
The idea of an engine powered by explosion was proposed by Soviet scientists as early as the 1950s to launch rockets into orbit.
This type of engine would be more efficient than a normal rocket engine and many prototypes have been built over the years, but most had a cylindrical combustion chamber that made the engine too heavy for real-life applications.
Wang’s team said that they had got around the problem by reducing the cylinder to a disk.
The new layout was previously considered too difficult to build because it required a complete redesign of nearly all components, but tests have proved the technology worked, Wang and his colleagues wrote in a conference paper published on cnki.net, China’s largest online research platform last month.
Fuel burns much more efficiently when detonated, and an explosion-powered rocket could lose 50 per cent fuel compared with normal rocket engines, according to Wang’s team.
A detonation engine could also be an ideal power source for hypersonic planes or missiles flying at five times the speed of sound or faster in the atmosphere, they said, because the engine can use oxygen from the air to reduce the weight of fuel carried by a rocket.
But the detonations risk damaging components and need to be controlled.
In a traditional detonation engine with the cylinder design, fuel and air was injected into a space between two round walls and ignited.
Explosive shock waves spin the walls around and trigger more explosions. The cylinder walls allowed the shock waves to develop.
But starting and maintaining the unstable process in the disk was much more challenging due to the limited space, said the researchers.
In January, Wang’s team conducted the first test flight of their air-breathing continuous rotation detonation engine.