Actually the beauty of this technology is that you are doing away with a lot of moving parts that a turbine engine consist of. In a CRDE what you have is an annular detonating chamber and fuel inlets. Normally There are no compressors no turbine blades that need to be made out of single crystals in a CRDE. But when there are turbines and compressors in a turbine engine that are working with a CRDE, the CRDE makes them operate more efficiently without the need for high temperatures normally needed with these engines.
A CRDE can also be incorporated in to a Tubojet Engine to render it more capable. The rotating detonation waves can also be applied in turbojet engines. Rotating detonation turbojet engine can produce a large effective thrust at low pressure ratio. This will reduce the number of compressors in conventional
turbine engines and then reduce the demanding requirements of the turbine manufacturing process. The resulting combustion chamber is smaller, simpler, and of higher thrust/weight ratio. Due to the characteristic of detonation waves, the performance of such engines will be increased greatly as well.
If you check the cylindrical annular chamber in below diagram you will see that the detonation waves for different fuels give different detonation wave structures.
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In order to have continuous detonation wave there are certain limitations and rules with respect to detonation chamber size and height. For example, the radial size of the chamber should not be smaller than one detonation-cell size.
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This technology, theoretically, would revolutionise the ramjet engines as well.
Here is the simple set up the Chinese scientists have carried out their tests with:
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Here is a cross sectional very slow motion picture taken by the French lab that carried out the tests which shows individual detonations in the combustion chamber;
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Experimental CRDE set up in USA:
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