Improvement of the Performance of a Turbo-Ramjet Engine for UAV and Missile Applications

An existing turbo-ramjet engine was modified in order to increase the produced thrust and sustain combustion at increased freejet Mach numbers. The engine’s afterburner fuel system was redesigned to improve the vaporization and atomization of the fuel. The engine performed satisfactorily at speeds up to Mach 0.3, producing 100% more thrust over the baseline turbojet. The data acquisition system of the turbo-ramjet engine’s performance measurement in a freejet facility was also updated. Various Computational Fluid Dynamics models of the flow through the turbo-ramjet engine were developed to visualize the flow and to predict the engine performance at different Mach numbers.