Optically accessible modular RDE platform for high-cadence testing of propellants and critical design parameters

Detonation propulsion systems are disruptive game-changing technologies that can enable high-speed, compact, and low-cost weapon platforms. Missiles with rotating detonation engine (RDE) propulsion systems offer a significant increase in range and speed with a reduction in size and/or increase in payload, providing significant strategic battlefield advantages. For the last decade, the U.S. has been involved with RDE technology evaluation, mostly laboratory demonstrators with different fuels, injection techniques, operating conditions, and configurations. One of the major challenges to solving the communities poor understanding of RDEs is the lack of understanding of the physics at the component level. A major hindrance to successfully and rapidly optimizing RDEs lies, partly, in restrictive ground-test RDEs that the community deploys, that lead to limited critical measurements, few if any diagnostics, and unknown boundary conditions limiting predictive CFD tools. Spectral Energies offers a robust alternative approach that is physics-based at each component level, and that is supported with relevant and highly-instrumented RDE experimentation coupled with advanced diagnostics and data-validated CFD tools. Spectral Energies believes that a modular, structured, and flexible RDE platform approach of evaluating the detailed physics at the component level to tie it together at the global performance level uniquely enables us to tie the story together for optimizing practical RDEs. The objectives of the proposed Phase II Base effort are to design, manufacture, and deliver to the Navy a highly modular, optically accessible, validated RDE platform for high-cadence testing of propellants and critical operating parameters. Computationally fast CFD methods will be used to inform the design process. The Phase II Option effort will include Spectral Energies traveling to the Navy facility to perform advanced diagnostics and characterization under Navy relevant RDE operating conditions.