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I'm going crazy here waiting for our summer to come back so I can get on with the business of testing my DIY Cruise missile. Unfortunately, our usually warm, calm and balmy February (the equivalent of July in the Northern Hemisphere) has produced some of the most violent storms for decades and rainfall that has been categorized as being seen just "once in a hundred years". So, to keep myself busy this is what I've been doing... It Can't be Done They said it can't be done -- hell, even *I* said it couldn't be done, but then I remembered that dismissing an something simply because it ought not to work can sometimes blinker you to a potentially great idea. So I figured I'd try to add an afterburner to one of my pulsejets -- and here's the result. Design Considerations One of the main reason that an afterburner is supposedly impractical on a pulsejet is because, unlike a turbojet, the exhaust of a pulsejet engine contains no oxygen to support the burning of additional fuel. The other reason why an afterburner shouldn't work on a pulsejet is because during the engine's intake phase, som of the exhaust gases actually reverse direction and are are sucked back into the engine. So how can we add an afterburner to an engine that suffers from these problems? Well clearly we need to do two things: add some oxygen to the exhaust flow ensure the flow doesn't get sucked back into the engine. Interestingly enough, there's already a device that does both these things -- it's called an augmentor. So, what would happen if we modified a passive thrust augmentor in such a way that it functioned as an afterburner? Would it work? That's what I wanted to find out. Even if it didn't work, I was pretty sure it would produce some spectacular flames during testing :-) I haven't yet had time to measure the thrust levels with and without afterburn but, to my surprise, the kart certainly shakes a whole lot more violently which suggests that there may be some kind of improvement. As soon as I get a chance I'll run the kart on the track and see if it's improved the top-speed. In the meantime, here is a video (1.6MB MPEG) for your entertainment :-)

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