Application of a Pressured-Based OpenFOAM Solver for Rotating Detonation Engines

Abstract

This study presents an open-source, pressure-based simulation framework for rotating detonation engines (RDEs) using the multicomponentFluid solver in OpenFOAM v12. A two-dimensional adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) method is developed and coupled with dynamic load balancing (DLB) to reduce computational cost. The framework is validated against one-dimensional detonation-tube experiments, a detailed Zeldovich-von Neumann-Döring (ZND) solution, two-dimensional cellular-detonation data, and a two-dimensional RDE reference simulation. The calculated detonation velocities agreed with the Chapman-Jouguet (CJ) value within 0.1%, and the ZND induction length was resolved within 1% at grid spacings of 0.5 μm or smaller. The simulations also captured the principal cellular scale and characteristic RDE flow structures and performance. After accounting for detonation-front inclination and stream-tube expansion, the horizontal detonation velocity differed from the corrected CJ value by 1.27%. The AMR and AMR+DLB results differed from the uniform-grid predictions by no more than 1.07%. AMR alone provided a 1.5-fold speed-up, whereas AMR+DLB achieved a 4.2-fold speed-up, demonstrating the computational efficiency of the framework for the present two-dimensional RDE configuration.

arXiv comment59 pages, 32 figures, 15 tables