DESIGN: A ramjet is designed around its inlet.

An object moving at high speed through air generates a high pressure region in front and a low pressure region to the rear. A ramjet uses this high pressure in front of the engine to force air through the tube, where it is heated by combusting some of it with fuel. It is then passed through a nozzle to accelerate it to supersonic speeds. This acceleration gives the ramjet forward thrust. A ramjet is sometimes referred to as a 'flying stovepipe', a very simple device comprising an air intake, a combustor, and a nozzle. Normally the only moving parts are those within the turbopump, which pumps the fuel to the combustor in a liquid-fuel ramjet. Solid-fuel ramjets are even simpler. By way of contrast, a turbojet uses a gas turbine driven fan to compress the air further. This gives greater efficiency and far more power at low speeds, where the ram effect is weak, but is also more complex, heavier and more expensive, and the temperature limits of the turbine section limits the top speed and thrust at high speed.

INLET: Ramjets try to exploit the very high dynamic pressure within the air approaching the intake lip. An efficient intake will recover much of the freestream stagnation pressure, which is used to support the combustion and expansion process in the nozzle. Most ramjets operate at supersonic flight speeds and use one or more conical (or oblique) shock waves, terminated by a strong normal shock, to slow down the airflow to a subsonic velocity at the exit of the intake. Further diffusion is then required to get the air velocity down to a suitable level for the combustor.

Subsonic intakes on ramjets are relatively simple Subsonic ramjets do not need such a sophisticated inlet since the airflow is already subsonic and a simple hole is usually used. This would also work at slightly supersonic speeds, but as the air will choke at the inlet, this is inefficient. The Inlet is divergent, to provide a constant inlet speed of Mach 0.5. COMBUSTOR: As with other jet engines the combustor's job is to create hot air. It does this by burning a fuel with the air at essentially constant pressure. The airflow through the jet engine is usually quite high, so sheltered combustion zones are produced by using flame holders that stop the flames from blowing out. Since there is no downstream turbine, a ramjet combustor can safely operate at stoichiometric fuel: air ratios, which implies a combustor exit stagnation temperature of the order of 2400 K for kerosene. Normally the combustor must be capable of operating over a wide range of throttle settings, for a range of flight speeds/altitudes. Usually a sheltered pilot region enables combustion to continue when the vehicle intake undergoes high yaw/pitch, during turns. Other flame stabilization techniques make use of flame holders, which vary in design from combustor cans to simple flat plates, to shelter the flame and improve fuel mixing. Overfuelling the combustor can cause the normal shock within a supersonic intake system to be pushed forward beyond the intake lip, resulting in a substantial drop in engine airflow and net thrust NOZZLE: The propelling nozzle is a critical part of a ramjet design, since it accelerates exhaust flow to produce thrust. For a ramjet operating at a subsonic flight Mach number, exhaust flow is accelerated through a converging nozzle. For a supersonic flight Mach number, acceleration is typically achieved via a convergent-divergent nozzle.

PERFORMANCE & CONTROL: Ramjets have been run from as low as 45 m/s (162 km/h)[7] upwards. Below about Mach 0.5 they give little thrust and are highly inefficient due to their low pressure ratios. Above this speed, given sufficient initial flight velocity, a ramjet will be self-sustaining. Indeed, unless the vehicle drag is extremely high, the engine/airframe combination will tend to accelerate to higher and higher flight speeds, substantially increasing the air intake temperature. As this could have a detrimental effect on the integrity of the engine and/or airframe, the fuel control system must reduce engine fuel flow to stabilize the flight Mach number and, thereby, air intake temperature to reasonable levels. Due to the stoichiometric combustion temperature, efficiency is usually good at high speeds (Mach 2-3), whereas at low speeds the relatively poor compression ratio means that ramjets are outperformed by turbojets or even rockets.
Ramjets have no moving parts -- much like a valveless pulsejet but they operate with cotinuous combustion rather than the series of explosions that give a pulsejet its characteristic noise. On the face of it a ramjet would seem to be the ideal kind of jet -- no spinning turbines, no vibrating valves and a seemingly ultra-simple construction. Unfortunately there are two things that work against the ramjet:

1. Operating Speed
Unlike pulsejets and jet-turbine engines, the ramjet will not operate unless it is moving through the air at a speed of at least 400 mph. If you attempt to start a ramjet while it's stationary or moving to slowly then it will give little or no thrust -- in fact you'll just get lazy, smokey flames billowing out both the intake and exhaust. This is because a ramjet relies on heating a fast-moving stream of cold air as it enters the engine and then expelling that air at a higher speed out the back. Unless the engine is moving rapidly through the air there's nothing for the burning fuel to heat.

2. Fuel Consumption
As a general rule of thumb, the fuel-efficiency of an internal combustion engine is related to the compression ratio at which it operates. That is to say -- the more the air/fuel mixture is compressed before it is ignited then the more power you'll get from a given amount of fuel. Diesel engines have a compression ratio of about 20:1, most car engines operate at compression ratios as high as 11:1, a pulsejet runs at a compression ratio of less than 2:1 and ramjets are about the same at low speeds. As a result, the ramjet (like the pulsejet) is not a particularly fuel-efficient engine. What makes it worse is that since the ramjet needs to be operated at very high speed, it's going to have to burn a lot of fuel just to overcome the drag it creats at that speed.

PRINCIPLE OF RAMJET:

The air inlet/diffuser admits air to the engine, reduces air velocity and develops ram pressure. The combustor adds heat and mass to the compressed air by burning a fuel. The nozzle converts some of the thermal energy of the hot combustion products to kinetic energy to produce thrust. Compression is given by the vehicle speed (bad performance at low speed, auxiliary bosster needed to reach interesting performances). No moving parts, flexibility in geometrical design. High thrust per unit frontal area.

Flight Range of Ramjet Propelled Vehicles Scientific Issues of Ramjet

Air intakes : the design is critical (efficiency on the whole flight range, sensitivity to flow distorsions, participation to instabilities)

Combustion chamber o combustion efficiency o lean and rich stability limits o wall cooling o operating instabilities

Combustion Efficiency and Stability Limits

Combustion efficiency and stability limits are depending on several parameters : fuel, equivalence ratio, air stagnation pressure and temperature Experimental approach through tests : expensive The ONERA's approach, the research ramjet : o a modular design reproducing the main features of an actual ramjet o the capability to get a detailed characterization of the reactive flow by using the most advanced optical diagnostics (LDV, LIF, PLIF) o a tool for validation the 3D turbulent reactive two phase flow codes (MBDA-ONERA)

Combustion Chamber Wall Cooling

Passive thermal protections o different materials (silicone based) are available Active thermal protection o a portion of the air flow entering is bypassed to protect the case and is reinjected in the combustion chamber through perforations o compatibility with booster integration demonstrated ; concept rather interesting for combustion stability o solution limited to flight Mach number less than 4 Some successful developments of all composite cases, application to ASMP-A

Operating Instabilities

Different types of instability : o overall instability involving the air intake(s) : low/medium frequency (100 to 300 Hz) ; generally cured by improving the air intake(s) o combustion chamber acoustical instability : from medium to high frequency ; the highest frequencies (tangential modes) are the most dangerous, inducing an accelerated consumption of the thermal protections Mainly faced on LFRJ ; some instabilities on DR connected to specific solid propellant combustion phenomena Numerical prediction of ramjet instabilities is not yet achieved. Different solutions are however known to reduce or suppress the instability levels, like : o geometrical devices : baffles, local caps o modification of the injection devices or controlled distribution of the fuel A compromise between performance and instability level is generally sought

Some Unconventional Applications of Ramjet

Ramjet propelled rotor Integrated ramjet in wing

RAMAC (RAM ACcelerator) : launching of a small mass at a very high speed from a tube (NASA, NLR, ISL) Ramjet propelled shell Nuclear ramjet : PLUTO US program (nuclear reactor TORY II C), cancelled in 1965 ; concept revisited in the USA ? MHD ramjet : AJAX/NEVA project (Leninetz) o a fascinating concept, but beyond the present technical possibilities

From Ramjet to Scramjet (Supersonic Combustion Ramjet or SCRJ)

Beyond Mach = 5 (hypersonic domain), ramjet is less and less efficient. Increasing of air stagnation temperature and pressure tends to limit the performance and to increase the thermal and mechanical loads on the combustion chamber walls To bypass these issues, the solution is to maintain the flow supersonic from the air inlet to the engine exit and to achieve the combustion in the supersonic flow A geometrical throat is therefore no longer needed to accelerate the flow and produce the thrust ; transition from subsonic to supersonic flow can also be achieved, without geometry variation, by heat addition Two variants of scramjet : o pure scramjet o dual mode ramjet allowing transition from subsonic to supersonic combustion

SCRAM JET: A scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) is a variant of a ramjet airbreathing combustion jet engine in which the combustion process takes place in supersonic airflow. As in ramjets, a scramjet relies on high vehicle speed to forcefully compress and decelerate the incoming air before combustion (hence ramjet), but whereas a ramjet decelerates the air to subsonic velocities before combustion, airflow in a scramjet is supersonic throughout the entire engine. This allows the scramjet to efficiently operate at extremely high speeds: theoretical projections place the top speed of a scramjet between Mach 12 and Mach 24[citation needed], which is near orbital velocity. The fastest air-breathing plane is a SCRAM jet design, the NASA X-43a which reached Mach 9.8. For comparison, the second fastest[1] manned airbreathing aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird, has a cruising speed of Mach 3.2.[2]

Design principles
Scramjet engines are a type of jet engine, and rely on the combustion of fuel and an oxidizer to produce thrust. Similar to conventional jet engines, scramjet-powered aircraft

carry the fuel on board, and obtain the oxidizer by the ingestion of atmospheric oxygen (as compared to rockets, which carry both fuel and an oxidizing agent). This requirement limits scramjets to suborbital atmospheric flight, where the oxygen content of the air is sufficient to maintain combustion.

Basic principles
Scramjets are designed to operate in the hypersonic flight regime, beyond the reach of turbojet engines, and, along with ramjets, fill the gap between the high efficiency of turbojets and the high speed of rocket engines. Turbomachinery-based engines, while highly efficient at subsonic speeds, become increasingly inefficient at transonic speeds, as the compressor fans found in turbojet engines require subsonic speeds to operate. While the flow from transonic to low supersonic speeds can be decelerated to these conditions, doing so at supersonic speeds results in a tremendous increase in temperature and a loss in the total enthalpy of the flow. Around Mach 34, turbomachinery is no longer useful, and ramstyle compression becomes the preferred method.[12] Ramjets utilize high-speed characteristics of air to literally 'ram' air through an inlet nozzle into the combustor. At transonic and supersonic flight speeds, the air upstream of the nozzle is not able to move out of the way quickly enough, and is compressed within the nozzle before being diffused into the combustor. Combustion in a ramjet takes place at subsonic velocities, similar to turbojets, but the combustion products are then accelerated through a convergent-divergent nozzle to supersonic speeds. As they have no mechanical means of compression, ramjets cannot start from a standstill, and generally do not achieve sufficient compression until supersonic flight. The lack of intricate turbomachinery allows ramjets to deal with the temperature rise associated with decelerating a supersonic flow to subsonic speeds, but this only goes so far: at near-hypersonic velocities, the temperature rise and inefficiencies discourage decelerating the flow to the magnitude found in ramjet engines.[12] Scramjet engines operate on the same principles as ramjets do, but do not decelerate the flow to subsonic velocities. Rather, a scramjet combustor is supersonic: the inlet decelerates the flow to a lower Mach number for combustion, after which it is accelerated to an even higher Mach number through the nozzle. By limiting the amount of deceleration, temperatures within the engine are kept at a tolerable level, from both a material and combustive standpoint. Even so, current scramjet technology requires the use of highenergy fuels and active cooling schemes to maintain sustained operation, often using hydrogen and regenerative cooling techniques.[13]

The compression, combustion, and expansion regions of: (a) turbojet, (b) ramjet, and (c) scramjet engines.

Theory
All scramjet engines have fuel injectors, a combustion chamber, a thrust nozzle and an intake, which compresses the incoming air. Sometimes engines also include a region which acts as a flame holder, although the high stagnation temperatures mean that an area of focused waves may be used, rather than a discrete engine part as seen in turbine engines. Other engines use pyrophoric fuel additives, such as silane, to avoid such issues. An isolator between the inlet and combustion chamber is often included to improve the homogeneity of the flow in the combustor and to extend the operating range of the engine.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) image of the NASA X-43A with scramjet attached to the underside at Mach 7 A scramjet is reminiscent of a ramjet. In a typical ramjet, the supersonic inflow of the engine is decelerated at the inlet to subsonic speeds and then reaccelerated through a nozzle to supersonic speeds to produce thrust. This deceleration, which is produced by a normal

shock, creates a total pressure loss which limits the upper operating point of a ramjet engine. For a scramjet, the kinetic energy of the freestream air entering the scramjet engine is large comparable to the energy released by the reaction of the oxygen content of the air with a fuel (say hydrogen). Thus the heat released from combustion at Mach 25 is around 10% of the total enthalpy of the working fluid. Depending on the fuel, the kinetic energy of the air and the potential combustion heat release will be equal at around Mach 8. Thus the design of a scramjet engine is as much about minimizing drag as maximizing thrust. This high speed makes the control of the flow within the combustion chamber more difficult. Since the flow is supersonic, no upstream influence propagates within the freestream of the combustion chamber. Thus throttling of the entrance to the thrust nozzle is not a usable control technique. In effect, a block of gas entering the combustion chamber must mix with fuel and have sufficient time for initiation and reaction, all the while traveling supersonically through the combustion chamber, before the burned gas is expanded through the thrust nozzle. This places stringent requirements on the pressure and temperature of the flow, and requires that the fuel injection and mixing be extremely efficient. Usable dynamic pressures lie in the range 20 to 200 kPa (0.2-2 bar), where

where q is the dynamic pressure of the gas (rho) is the density of the gas v is the velocity of the gas To keep the combustion rate of the fuel constant, the pressure and temperature in the engine must also be constant. This is problematic because the airflow control systems that would facilitate this are not physically possible in a scramjet launch vehicle due to the large speed and altitude range involved, meaning that it must travel at an altitude specific to its speed. Because air density reduces at higher altitudes, a scramjet must climb at a specific rate as it accelerates to maintain a constant air pressure at the intake. This optimal climb/descent profile is called a "constant dynamic pressure path". It is thought that scramjets might be operable up to an altitude of 75 km.[14] Fuel injection and management is also potentially complex. One possibility would be that the fuel be pressurized to 100 bar by a turbo pump, heated by the fuselage, sent through the turbine and accelerated to higher speeds than the air by a nozzle. The air and fuel stream are crossed in a comb like structure, which generates a large interface. Turbulence due to the higher speed of the fuel leads to additional mixing. Complex fuels like kerosene need a long engine to complete combustion. The minimum Mach number at which a scramjet can operate is limited by the fact that the compressed flow must be hot enough to burn the fuel, and have pressure high enough that

the reaction be finished before the air moves out the back of the engine. Additionally, in order to be called a scramjet, the compressed flow must still be supersonic after combustion. Here two limits must be observed: Firstly, since when a supersonic flow is compressed it slows down, the level of compression must be low enough (or the initial speed high enough) not to slow the gas below Mach 1. If the gas within a scramjet goes below Mach 1 the engine will "choke", transitioning to subsonic flow in the combustion chamber. This effect is well known amongst experimenters on scramjets since the waves caused by choking are easily observable. Additionally, the sudden increase in pressure and temperature in the engine can lead to an acceleration of the combustion, leading to the combustion chamber exploding. Secondly, the heating of the gas by combustion causes the speed of sound in the gas to increase (and the Mach number to decrease) even though the gas is still travelling at the same speed. Forcing the speed of air flow in the combustion chamber under Mach 1 in this way is called "thermal choking". It is clear that a pure scramjet can operate at Mach numbers of 6-8,[15] but in the lower limit, it depends on the definition of a scramjet. Certainly there are designs where a ramjet transforms into a scramjet over the Mach 3-6 range (Dual-mode scramjets).[16] In this range however, the engine is still receiving significant thrust from subsonic combustion of "ramjet" type. The high cost of flight testing and the unavailability of ground facilities have hindered scramjet development. A large amount of the experimental work on scramjets has been undertaken in cryogenic facilities, direct-connect tests, or burners, each of which simulates one aspect of the engine operation. Further, vitiated facilities, storage heated facilities, arc facilities and the various types of shock tunnels each have limitations which have prevented perfect simulation of scramjet operation. The HyShot flight test showed the relevance of the 1:1 simulation of conditions in the T4 and HEG shock tunnels, despite having cold models and a short test time. The NASA-CIAM tests provided similar verification for CIAM's C-16 V/K facility and the Hyper-X project is expected to provide similar verification for the Langley AHSTF,[17] CHSTF[18] and 8 ft (2.4 m) HTT. Computational fluid dynamics has only recently reached a position to make reasonable computations in solving scramjet operation problems. Boundary layer modeling, turbulent mixing, two-phase flow, flow separation, and real-gas aerothermodynamics continue to be problems on the cutting edge of CFD. Additionally, the modeling of kinetic-limited combustion with very fast-reacting species such as hydrogen makes severe demands on computing resources. Reaction schemes are numerically stiff requiring reduced reaction schemes. Much of scramjet experimentation remains classified. Several groups including the US Navy with the SCRAM engine between 19681974, and the Hyper-X program with the X43A have claimed successful demonstrations of scramjet technology. Since these results have not been published openly, they remain unverified and a final design method of scramjet engines still does not exist.

The final application of a scramjet engine is likely to be in conjunction with engines which can operate outside the scramjet's operating range. Dual-mode scramjets combine subsonic combustion with supersonic combustion for operation at lower speeds, and rocket-based combined cycle (RBCC) engines supplement a traditional rocket's propulsion with a scramjet, allowing for additional oxidizer to be added to the scramjet flow. RBCCs offer a possibility to extend a scramjet's operating range to higher speeds or lower intake dynamic pressures than would otherwise be possible.

Vehicle performance
The performance of a launch system is complex and depends greatly on its weight. Normally craft are designed to maximise range (R), orbital radius (R) or payload mass fraction () for a given engine and fuel. This results in tradeoffs between the efficiency of the engine (takeoff fuel weight) and the complexity of the engine (takeoff dry weight), which can be expressed by the following: