Preliminary Performance Assessment of a Fuel-Cell Powered Hypersonic Airbreathing Magjet

A variant of the magnetoplasma jet engine (magjet) is here proposed for airbreathing flight in the hypersonic regime. As shown in Figure 1, the engine consists of two distinct ducts: the high-speed duct, in which power is added electromagnetically to the incoming air by a momentum addition device, and the fuel cell duct in which the flow stagnation temperature is reduced by extracting energy through the use of a magnetoplas-madynamic (MPD) generator. The power generated is then used to accelerate the flow exiting the fuel cells with a fraction bypassed to the high-speed duct. The analysis is performed using a quasi one-dimensional model neglecting the Hall and ion slip effects, and fix-ing the fuel cell efficiency to 0.6. Results obtained show that the specific impulse of the magjet is at least equal to and up to 3 times the one of a turbojet, ram-jet, or scramjet in their respective flight Mach number range. Should the air stagnation temperature in the fuel cell compartment not exceed 5 times the incoming air static temperature, the maximal flight Mach number possible would vary between 6.5 and 15 for a magnitude of the ratio between the Joule heating and the work interaction in the MPD generator varied between 0.25 and 0.01, respectively. Increasing the mass flow rate ratio between the high speed and fuel cell ducts from 0.2 to 20 increases the engine efficiency by as much as 3 times in the lower supersonic range, while resulting in a less than 10% increase for a flight Mach number exceeding 8.