Author(s)

A.C. McIntosh & M. Forman

Abstract

The paper investigates the remarkable combustion chamber of the bombardier beetle with a view to learning from the great efficiency of blast that the 1mm combustion chamber of this creature achieves with repeated explosions at 2-3 per ms. In reality the two chemicals are trace species in water which is then heated to boiling point by the presence of a catalyst. To simplify the numerical study presented here, a two-phase (water / steam) computation is performed to simulate the hot discharge from the brachinine bombardier beetle. The study only concentrates on the heating process within the reaction chamber rather than modelling the full kinetics of the hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide reac

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