Numerical Investigation of Contact Burning in an Air-Breathing Continuous Rotating Detonation Engine

Three-dimensional (3D) numerical simulations of a continuous rotating detonation engine are carried out with an unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver. The second-order upwind advection upstream splitting method and second-order Runge-Kutta method are used to discretize space and time terms, and detailed 9-species 19-step hydrogen-oxygen reactions are applied in this study. Nonpremixed rotating detonation is successfully realized numerically, and the characteristics of the detonation wave are revealed. The expanding angle of the combustor has a great impact on the shape of the detonation wave but has little influence on the propagation velocity. The evolution of combustion on the contact region is analyzed in detail; a more accurate schematic of non-premixed air-breathing rotating detonation engines is given in this paper. A rough analysis of the heat performance of the contact region shows that the heat release of the contact region is approximately one-third of the total heat release and the configurations of the combustors do not affect the proportion.