The Hanin Prize Seminar – Harnessing Unsteady Forces to Achieve Powerful Propulsion

Propulsion and combustion scientists and engineers have been fighting combustion instabilities in solid and liquid rockets and in air-breathing propulsion systems for many decades.  This has been recognized as one of the most severe hindrances to the development of these engines because the unsteady pressure forces that are amplified under these conditions can result in destruction of the engine.   Engines are designed with various control strategies to keep pressure pulsations from reaching excessive levels and often their operation boundaries are set to avoid entering these dangerous zones.   More recently, interest has been growing in the propulsion community in developing engines that, by design, operate in an unsteady manner.  These types of engines are based on concepts such as pressure gain combustion or constant volume combustion.  Though not new, these technologies have the potential to significantly increase the propulsive efficiency. This seminar will propose an interesting possible link between the new insight gained from recent research in the latter topic to the older problem of combustion instabilities.