Experimental research on the performance of hollow and annular rotating detonation engines with nozzles

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• The performance of hollow and annular RDEs with nozzles are compared. • The hollow RDE can reduce the injection pressure loss. • The hollow chamber brings a higher performance loss. Rotating detonation engines (RDEs), which are hoped to achieve significant performance improvements in propulsion systems, have received much attention in recent years. The annular RDE and hollow RDE are two of the major configurations of which the structure is very similar to each other. However, there has been a lack of experimental research discussing the differences in their performance. In the present study, experiments on hollow and annular RDEs are conducted. Four configurations in total are tested at ambient conditions: hollow and annular combustion chambers with two exit throat areas. The gaseous methane and gaseous oxygen are used as propellants. The results reveal that the c*-efficiency of the two hollow combustion chamber configurations is on average 0.7 and 0.79, which is lower than the 0.75 and 0.84 of annular chambers. However, it is exhibited that the hollow RDE can ensure high detonation efficiency at a lower injection pressure ratio. From this perspective, the hollow RDE can be considered a more promising configuration for practical application because it provides a new approach to reducing injection pressure loss. In addition, the analysis of nozzle indicates that the Laval nozzles overperform the aerospike nozzles, which goes against previous studies. The mechanism that accounts for this phenomenon needs further investigation.