Experimental study for stable operation performance of pulse detonation engine

The detonation pressure and average thrust of pulse detonation engine (PDE) prototype are measured at different operation frequency and equivalence ratio using gasoline as fuel and air as oxidizers in order to investigate the stable operation range of PDE in detail. The maximum and minimum equivalence ratio under different operation frequency are obtained successfully. The results indicate that the stable operation range is very wide when the detonation frequency is low, but the stable operation range becomes smaller when the detonation frequency becomes high progressively. The average thrust of PDE increases at the beginning but decreases in the end with the equivalence ratio increasing under the same operation frequeney. However, the change extent is very small. The impulse decreases rapidly when the equivalence ratio increases. The average thrust of PDE increases linearly with the operation frequency approximately for the same equivalence ratio.