Flame Holders

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Raymond G
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Flame Holders

Post by Raymond G » Tue Apr 13, 2004 4:41 pm

Anyone care to share flame holder ideas that they have actually tested and have worked? I've been trying several and have had no success so far, so just wanted to see if anyone has had luck.

Regards,
Raymond

Stephen H
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Post by Stephen H » Tue Apr 13, 2004 10:54 pm

i think you will find not many people have tested any ramjet anythings because of the speed they need to be going before the work it just makes it to difficult!

Stephen

Ray(in England)
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Flameholders

Post by Ray(in England) » Wed Apr 14, 2004 5:48 pm

Raymond,
Glenn Olsen has some ideas about flameholders on his webpages,'alternative accelerators'.
But I don't know if he has proved that they work.
Ray.

Glenn Olson
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Post by Glenn Olson » Tue Apr 20, 2004 3:22 am

Raymond,

As Stephen has stated there appears to be little work available specific to amateur ramjet flame holders. NASA (as NACA) accomplished a large number of tests of flame holders in the late 1940s and 1950s. I suggest you start with http://www.alt-accel.com/arla/arla-bp.htm where you can find my meager efforts and references to the NASA material.

The real difficulty for the amateur. from my perspective, is building a decent test setup. I used a leaf blower for my air source but it probably simulated an airspeed of no more than 80 ft/sec where an operational ramjet will see about 200 fps through the combustion chamber. A flame holder that operates well at 70 fps may not operate at 200 fps.

Since I performed those tests I've thought of two possible ways to improve my test setup. Anyone can rent the type of air compressors used for jack hammers through their local heavy equipment rental house. These have large gas/diesel engines running Roots blowers that may do the job. Alternatively, living in the country I have access to used water pressure tanks that are good to about 70 psi and sized between 500 and 5000 gallons. These can be converted over to size LARGE air tanks which should give enough time to test a full up ramjet engine. I just haven't had time to pursue either though.

Good luck.

Glenn

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