Robert Maddox goes by the nickname Rocketman, and it isn’t as a result of he is an astronaut or actually loves the traditional Elton John track. Maddox builds pulsejet engines and installs them in bikes and go-karts. On this video, he and a buddy take two of those wild machines for a high-speed blast via a dry lake mattress.
Each machines are one thing to behold. The rider straddles the blue one like a bike, nevertheless it has 4 wheels. An enormous exhaust chimney sticks up from the again. The purple kart has three stacked pulsejets that make the car appear to be one thing out of a cartoon.
Motor1.com reached out to Maddox for extra particulars about these builds. The blue car makes use of his Maddoxjets 250-pound-thrust pulsejet engine operating on gasoline. It has a reed valve that permits air into the combustion chamber however closes off through the explosion. “The valved engine requires lots of air blown in it to start out it, and a giant leaf blower is simpler to make use of within the discipline than compressed air,” Maddox instructed us.
The purple kart makes use of a valve-less design that has no shifting components. It makes a complete of 150 kilos of thrust from the three pipes. “If I made a single engine that made 150 kilos of thrust, the engine can be means too giant to suit on a kart,” he stated.
This car makes use of liquid propane to get began after which runs on diesel. It is “my very own gas injection that I ought to patent,” Maddox stated. “Diesel has extra energy than the propane and runs cooler and is straightforward to only pour right into a gas tank, so I exploit each as a result of I can run longer with out filling the propane tank, which is a ache.”
The video above supplies an concept of how Maddox constructs these pulsejet engines as a result of he is assembling a bigger one for his purple kart. He makes use of a waterjet cutter to create every of the elements. Then, he rolls them into tubes and welds every part collectively.
For those who actually need to get into the science behind pulsejets, try this senior venture by California Polytechnic State College college students. They created a design utilizing a twin consumption and a single exhaust.