I attended the 2022 HiSST meeting, the 2ND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HIGH-SPEED VEHICLE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, in Bruges, Belgium. Bruges is a lovely city and I highly recommend a visit. It is walkable and has many excellent restaurants, museums, breweries, and chocolate shops.

Our session was on Rotating Detonation Engines. Ralf Deiterding (University of Scotland) and Sarah Mecklem (University of Queensland) were the chairs. There were three talks, mine on “Rotational Detonation Engine for Hypersonic Flight”, a talk by Prof. Deiterding of the University Of Southampton on, “Design and testing of a low mass flow RDE running on ethylene-oxygen,” and one by Yue Huang on, “Study on Fuel Injection and Geometry of Plane-radial Rotating Detonation Combustor.”

Prof. Deiterding’s talk showed his team’s impressive experimental work. He had movies of their experiments in operation.

Yue Huang discussed fuel injection into an RDE showing the pros and cons of three different approaches. His team’s work looked at mixing in the combustor instead of pre-mixing.

My talk gave an overview of RDE technology. I discussed research at Princeton University on the stabilization of the RDE flame front. Good results have been obtained with ozone injection and plasma injection. I gave the results of our analysis showing performance advantages over a conventional turboramjet. We use a turbocharger to pressure the RDE at low Mach number.

I discussed applications including hypersonic boost guide passenger airliners and two stage to orbit launch vehicles. An RDE might allow first-stage Mach numbers in excess of Mach 7.

On Thursday the Conference dinner was held. It was a three course dinner at a restaurant on the North Sea. The rain cleared for the event.

The venue was beautiful. A band played throughout the reception and dinner.

It was announced that the 2024 HiSST meeting will be held in Pusan, South Korea.