A microwave thruster system that can convert microwave power directly to thrust without a gas propellant is developed. In the system, a cylindrical tapered resonance cavity and a magnetron microwave source are used respectively as the thruster cavity and the energy source to generate the electromagnetic wave. The wave is radiated into and then reflected from the cavity to form a pure standing wave with non-uniform electromagnetic pressure distribution. Consequently, a net electromagnetic thrust exerted on the axis of the thruster cavity appears, which is demonstrated through theoretical calculation based on the electromagnetic theory. The net electromagnetic thrust is also experimentally measured in the range from 70 mN to 720 mN when the microwave output power is from 80 W to 2500 W.
Aphids are infected by a series of bacteria that can help them survive on specific host plants. However, the associations between aphids and these bacteria are not clear, and the bacterial communities in many aphid species are poorly characterized. Here, we investigated the bacterial communities of cotton aphids (Aphis gossypii) on 2 representative winter host plants and transferred to 3 summer host plants by 16S rDNA sequencing using the Illumina MiSeq platform. Our results revealed that the bacterial communities varied among cotton aphids on hibiscus, cotton aphids on pomegranate, cotton aphids on cotton transferred from hibiscus, cotton aphids on muskmelon transferred from hibiscus, cotton aphids on cucumber transferred from hibiscus,. The diversity and richness of the bacterial communities were significantly higher in aphids on muskmelon and aphids on cucumber than in the other treatments. There were two main factors influencing the distribution of internal bacterial OTUs revealed by principal component analysis, including the differences among Punicaceae, Malvaceae and Cucurbitaceae. There were 28 bacterial communities with significant differences between two arbitrary treatments, which could be grouped into 6 main clusters depending on relative abundance. Moreover, our results indicated that in addition to the obligate endosymbiont Buchnera, with a dominant position (> 52%), A. gossypii also harbored 3 facultative endosymbiotic bacteria (Serratia, Arsenophonus, and Wolbachia) and 3 possibly symbiotic bacteria (Acinetobacter, Pantoea, and Flavobacterium). There were several correspondences between the symbiotic bacteria in cotton aphids and the specific host plants of the aphids. This study provides a better understanding of the interactions among symbiotic bacteria, aphids and host plants, suggesting that the selection pressure on aphid bacterial communities is likely to be exerted by the species of host plants.
Erosive burning refers to the augmentation of propellant burning rate appears when the velocity of combustion gas flowing parallel to the propellant surface is relatively high. Erosive burning can influence the total burning rate of propellant and performance of solid rocket motors dramatically. There have been many different models to evaluate erosive burning rate for now. Yet, due to the complication processes involving in propellant and solid rocket motor combustion, unknown constants often exist in these models. To use these models, trial-and-error procedure must be implemented to determine the unknown constants firstly. This makes many models difficult to estimate erosive burning before plenty of experiments. In this paper, a new erosive burning rate model is proposed based on the assumption that the erosive burning rate is proportional to the heat flux at the propellant surface. With entrance effect, roughness, and transpiration considered, convective heat transfer coefficient correlation proposed in recent years is used to compute the heat flux. This allows the release of unknown constants, making the model universal and easy to implement. The computational data of the model are compared with different experimental and computational data from different models. Results show that good accuracy (10%) with experiments can be achieved by this model. It is concluded that the present model could be used universally for erosive burning rate evaluation of propellant and performance prediction of solid rocket motor as well.
The estimation of erosive burning is of great importance for the internal ballistics computation of a solid rocket motor (SRM) with a large aspect ratio. Because of the variety of parameters affecting erosive burning, most of the erosive burning models developed in earlier years usually contain unknown constants that need to be identified by a trial-and-error procedure for each SRM. Based on an SRM with a cylindrical grain, a new erosive burning model, which coupled the heat transfer between the gas and grain, was proven to be effective previously. To expand the scope of application of this model, in this paper, earlier and new erosive burning models were used in the transient one-dimensional internal ballistics computation, to obtain the internal ballistics for a star-grain SRM. A comparison between the computational and experimental results indicated that both the earlier and new erosive burning models can obtain results with good accuracy for a star-grain SRM. The paper shows that with no constants to be identified, the Ma model is easy to use and has the potential to predict the erosive burning rate before a firing test.
To acquire the erosive characteristics of two-channel combustion chambers, a quasi-one-dimensional internal ballistics model is proposed. Combining the model with two different erosive burning models, the modified L-R expression, and the Mukunda-Paul expression, the flow parameters and the internal ballistics performance of a test solid rocket motor are computed. The results show good agreement with experimental data. According to the results, the more severe the erosion is, the earlier, longer, and gentler the tail-off stage becomes. During the tail-off stage, the dramatic drop of pressure leads to a low normal burning rate and makes it easier for erosion burning to occur. For this reason, notable erosive burning might appear during tail-off if the case-to-throat area ratio is extremely low. The results also show that flows in the inner channel and the outer channel are similar but not identical. This leads to different erosive burning behaviours in the two channels. Also, the two erosive burning rate models involved in this paper are compared. It seems that the M-P expression provides better results than the modified L-R expression does, since it reveals the threshold phenomena. Besides, the M-P expression has great advantages for its universality for most propellants and different SRM geometries.
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