Abstract
Direct observation of a rotating detonation engine combustion chamber has enabled the extraction of the kinematics of its detonation waves. These records exhibit a rich set of instabilities and bifurcations arising from the interaction of coherent wave fronts and global gain dynamics. We develop a model of the observed dynamics by recasting the Majda detonation analog as an autowave process. The solution fronts become attractors of the engine, i.e., mode-locked rotating detonation waves. We find that denotative energy release competes with dissipation and gain recovery to produce the observed dynamics and a bifurcation structure common to other driven-dissipative systems, such as mode-locked lasers.
6 More- Received 21 August 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.101.013106
©2020 American Physical Society