Leakage flow between the rotor and the stator can cause serious performance degradation of wave rotors which utilize nonsteady shock waves to directly transfer energy from burned gases to precompressed air. To solve this problem, primary flow features relevant to leakage are extracted and it was found that the leakage-attributed performance degradation could be abstracted to a special initial-boundary value problem of one-dimensional Euler equations. Then, a general loss assessment method is proposed to solve the problem of nonsteady flow loss prediction. Using the above method, a reasonable physical hypothesis of the initial-boundary value problem depicting the nonsteady leakage flow process is proposed and further, a closed-form leakage loss analytical model combined with an empirical correction method for the discharge coefficient is established. Finally, with the experimentally verified CFD method, comprehensive numerical verification is conducted for the loss prediction model; it is proved that the physical hypothesis of the proposed model in this paper is reasonable and the model is capable of predicting nonsteady shock wave attenuation due to leakage exactly within the range of parameter variations of wave rotors.
Numerical investigation of shock wave attenuation in channels using water obstacles
