Design of Pulse Jet Engine for UAV

Design of Pulse Jet Engine for UAV

1Sai Kumar A, Student,

Department of Aeronautical Engineering MLR Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, INDIA

2Dr. S. Srinivas Prasad, Professor Department of Aeronautical Engineering,

MLR Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, INDIA.

3Vamsi Krishna .C, Student, Department of Aeronautical Engineering,

MLR Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, INDIA.

Abstract Research and development of pulsejet engines has been mainly confined to enthusiast circles. There is an emphasis on adapting the Pulsejet technology to smaller aircrafts or to the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. The aim of this project is to develop a pulsejet engine and study the effects of free stream flight speed on performance of these pulsejet engines. The primary design requirement is that engine must produce a Thrust of 2.5kg. The current effort is focused on using the analytical method to attain the required configuration of the pulsejet engine and then, use computational software to simulate and predict the working nature of the pulsejet.

KeywordsPulsejet; Unmanned Aerial Vehicle , Analytical Methods,Simulation, Thrust.

Nomenclature:

P Pressure

T Temperature

Specific Volume V Velocity

S Entropy

Q Heat Energy

µ Kinematic Viscosity h Enthalpy

Adiabatic Index M Mach Number m Mass

Density

Cv Specific Heat at Constant Volume Cp Specific Heat at Constant Pressure a Speed of Sound

I Total Impulse

s – Specific Fuel Consumption C – Calorific Value

A Area L Length

D – Diameter V – Volume F Force

1. INTRODUCTION

   A Pulsejet Engine is essentially a hollow tube that utilizes sound waves to induce fluid flow and produce thrust. Pulsejet engine is one of the simplest forms of air breathing propulsion ever developed. Pulsejet engines have few moving parts making them economical to construct and maintain. These are scalable, light weight, low cost and fairly efficient at converting fuel to heat and thrust and there is no such thing as a "misfire" in a pulse jet. The main advantage of the pulsejet engines is their simple construction without any moving parts. These advantages make them ideal for use in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).

   The aim of project is to design a pulse jet engine which can be used in UAVs for generating required power. The engine must produce a Thrust of 4 kg. The operating conditions are taken to be the standard cruise conditions for low speed UAVs. For reference, the operating velocity of the flight is taken as 120-185 km/hr

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

   The concept of the first pulsed jet can be traced back to an 1882 Publication by Nikolai Egorovich Zhukovsky. His paper, On the reaction force of in-and-out oscillating flowing liquid, is the first reference to the Vapor Pulse Jet. The subject of the paper was developed in two subsequent editions published in 1885 and 1908.

   Fig 1 Argus Pulsejet Engine

   Serious interest in pulsejet engines was not established again until the late 1920s, when German engineer Paul Schmidt (Reynst 1961) accidentally rediscovered the pulsed combustion principal whilst attempting to achieve detonation within an engine. The most well known and most

   successful application for pulsejet engines came in 1941 with the first test flight of the German V-1 flying bomb

   Fig 2 Lockwood and Hillers Pulsejet engine

   Lockwood and Hiller developed a U-shape engine that claimed to have an extremely high thrust to weight ratio (Lockwood, 1952). They experimented with many ways to increase thrust as well for the purpose of making a lightweight engine.

   1. Types of Pulsejet Engines

      Based on the valve these can be classified into two types.

      They are

      • Valveless Pulsejet Engine

      • Valved Pulsejet Engine

        These can be further classified based on shape of pulse jet engine into three types. They are:

      • Inline System

      • U-shaped System

      • Linear System

3. PULSEJET THEORY

   A pulsejets operation can be explained by combining two- cycles: the Lenoir Cycle which consists of isentropic compression followed by constant volume heat addition and then adiabatic expansion and the Humphrey Cycle, which operates similarly but has an isentropic compression added to the cycle. Pulsejets typically have a very small compression ratio that reaches a maximum at around 1.7.

   1. Lenoir Cycle

      The Lenoir Cycle consists of three thermodynamic processes

      Process a b : Heat Addition at Constant Volume Process b c : Isentropic Expansion

      Process c a : Heat Rejection at Constant Pressure

      B.Humphrey Cycle

      The Humphrey cycle is a thermodynamic cycle similar to the pulse detonation engine cycle. The ideal Humphrey cycle consists of 4 processes they are:

      Process a b : Isentropic compression Process b c : Constant-volume heat addition. Process c d : Isentropic Expansion of the gas

      Process d a : Constant-pressure heat rejection

      Fig 4 Humphrey Cycle

4. CYCLE ANALYSIS

   Consider a pulsejet placed at a free stream of Mach Number (M). The fluid is compressed from free stream to combustion chamber. Since, the compression from free stream to stagnation condition follows inverse isentropic expansion the combustion chamber conditions are stagnation.

   Because of bad shape of the diffuser for pulsejet engines, only a part of kinetic energy is recovered as pressure energy. This can be assumed as

   Fig 3 Lenoir Cycle

   P2 = 0.5 P1

   As the air enters the combustion chamber the temperature will be same as that of free stream. So, the temperature at the inlet of the combustion chamber will be same as that of free stream i.e.,

   A. Combustion Chamber

   T2 = T1

   Since the combustion process occurs at constant volume.

   The heat added per unit mass is given by

   h = Cv (T3- T2)

   Where T3 is temperature at the end of combustion process

   1. Impulse Calculation

   2. Specific Fuel Consumption

      If we have an average mass flow rate (), the average thrust is Ve. The thrust is diminished by intake momentum of Vo. The actual thrust is (Ve – Vo). If C is calorific value of the fuel and is efficiency of combustion. Then specific fuel combustion can be calculated using

   3. Tharratts Approach For Small Puilsejet Design

      The Propulsive Duct paper condensed much of the known pulsejet theory into a few simple formulas and constants. When it comes to designing a powerful, reliable pulsejet engine the simple relations are valid. The validity of this formula has been verified against a wide number of different and proven pulsejet designs including the Argus V1 and Dynajet.

      These equations are

      1) A = 2.2F

      1. Valve area = 0.23 x mean cross-sectional area

         Apart from these equations, a few assumptions are to be made to attain at the actual design layout. They are

         • L/D – 8

         • Number of Valves – 10

         • Number of Gaps – 10

         • Efficiency of Valve – 70%

   Table 1 DESIGN CALCULATIONS

   Parameter	Magnitude	Units
   Mean Area	32.258	cm2
   Mean Diameter	6.410	cm
   Mean Volume	1654.292	cm3
   20% Volume	330.858	cm3
   Length of pulsejet engine	51.283	cm
   Valve Area	7.419	cm2
   effective valve area	10.6	cm2
   Number of Valves	10
   Area of Each Valves	1.060	cm2
   Diameter of Each Valve	1.162	cm
   Size of gaps	0.635	cm
   Number of Gaps	10
   Circumference of valve center circle	17.970	cm
   Diameter of Circle	5.723	cm
   Diameter of circle	6.885	cm
   Area of inner circle covering valves	14.650	cm2
   Inlet area	47.809	cm2
   Diameter of Inlet	7.804	cm
   Length of Combustion Section	16.691	cm

5. MODELING AND ANALYSIS

   The modeling of the pulsejet is done in ANSYS V12.0 and later, was analyzed in ANSYS Fluent

   A. Modeling

   The Modeling in ANSYS was done in design Modeler. The Design Modeler application is a parametric feature-based modeler. Its modeling paradigm is to sketch 2D profiles and use them to generate features. In CAD systems, features are collections of geometric shapes with which you add or cut material from a model. In the Design Modeler application, you can also use features to slice a model into separate bodies for improved mesh generation or to imprint faces for patch loading.

   Fig 5 Pulsejet Modeled in ANSS

   B. Analysis

   As Mentioned, The analysis was done in ANSYS Fluent. The Fluent provides stage to perform combustion analysis using PDF Transport table method. Before analysis, the proper fuel to air fraction is found out using Stoichometric relation between air and Methane. The ration was found out to be 17.2.

   Fig 7 Velocity Contour

   Velocity=10m/s and Exhaust Pipe Radius= 28mm

   Fig 6 PDF Transport Table

   The analysis was done for various operating conditions and varying from 10m/s to 50 m/s. apart from varying the velocity, the study of effect of diameter of exhaust pipe was done.

   Fig 9 Velocity Contour

6. REDULTS AND DISCUSSION

A. Case-I

Velocity=10m/s and Exhaust Pipe Radius= 32mm

Fig 10 Temperature Contour

1. Case-III

   Velocity=20m/s and Exhaust Pipe Radius= 28mm

   Fig 11 Velocity Contour

   From the above results, The pulsejet is said to work successfully if it is able to maintain a stable pressure , with the minimum pressure below atmospheric pressure and also if the combustion of the reactants is localized to the combustion chamber with the majority of the combustion products going out through the exhaust pipe. Hence, the successful working of a pulsejet is quantitatively observed by monitoring the pressure, velocity and the temperature at specific points in the combustion chamber.

   The Simulation was also helpful to draw the optimal operating conditions for pulsejet engine which include a low pressure in the combustion chamber, a high temperature for the fluid inside the pulsejet and completely filling the pulsejet with the fuel

2. Case-IV

Fig 12 Temperature Contour

VII..CONCLUSIONS

The present work on the design of Pulsejet engines presents interesting results on various design aspects. It enlightens the importance of having simplified expressions for attaining appropriate design. The result presents an interesting view of how the pulse jet runs with varying forward velocities of the flight. This also leads to future work that can be done to experimentally test these jets based on the CFD presented.

There are several conclusions that can be drawn from the work presented above

• Design of small size Pulsejet Engines is easy as large numbers of complex equations are eliminated.

• The thrust can be increased with decrease in the diameter of exhaust pipe for same operating condition.

  Velocity=50m/s and Exhaust Pipe Radius= 28mm

  Fig 13 Velocity Contour

  Fig 14 Temperature Contour

  • For Modeling the running pulsejet in a wind tunnel on a sting is very feasible and when compared with the experimental wind tunnel data

  • CFD tests show feasibility of building a Pulsejet Engine

  • They are inefficient when operated at low flight velocities ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to express my heart-felt gratitude to my parents without whom I would not have been privileged to achieve and fulfill my dreams. My heartfelt thanks to all the members of faculty and other staff for making us understand the concept of Designing and making our experience a wonderful one.

REFERENCES

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