Design and Testing of a Water-Cooled Center Body in a Small Scale Rotating Detonation Engine

Small scale Rotating Detonation Engines (RDEs) lend themselves to preliminary materials testing since they require smaller amounts of potentially unproven test materials. However, proper testing of high performance materials necessitates the ability to run for longer durations. This work details the development and testing of a water cooled center body to enable long duration runs with novel outer bodies on a "micro" 28 mm outer diameter RDE. Designed based on published RDE heat flux data and modeling via thermal resistance equations, this cooled center body has shown success in all tests to date. Many runs over a minute have been completed, with one run reaching 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Visible damage beyond discoloration has yet to be observed. Calorimetry data obtained from these tests show a maximum heat flux into the center body of 10.6