Koch James, Kurosaka Mitsuru, Knowlen Carl, Kutz J Nathan
William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-2400, USA.
Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-3925, USA.
Phys Rev E. 2020 Jan;101(1-1):013106. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.101.013106.
Direct observation of a rotating detonation engine combustion chamber has enabled the extraction of the kinematics of its detonation waves. These records exhibit a rich set of instabilities and bifurcations arising from the interaction of coherent wave fronts and global gain dynamics. We develop a model of the observed dynamics by recasting the Majda detonation analog as an autowave process. The solution fronts become attractors of the engine, i.e., mode-locked rotating detonation waves. We find that denotative energy release competes with dissipation and gain recovery to produce the observed dynamics and a bifurcation structure common to other driven-dissipative systems, such as mode-locked lasers.
