Full-Size Pulse Jet

The Pulse Jet was my grade 12 science fair project that my partner and I took to the Greater Vancouver Regional Science Fair at UBC in 2017. Our project aimed to test sustainable alternatives to jet fuel. My partner and I constructed the pulse jet with assistance from a supervising parent based on the design below from an online source.

I learned how to use a sheet roller, MIG welder, and guillotine during the construction of this project. Due to our lack of construction and pulse jet experience, we couldn’t get it fully functional for our testing. A short video of the issues we had with it is below.

Data Collection

Due to the failures in the above pulse jet and a limited amount of time, we had to swap to another method to collect our data. We fashioned a smaller pulsejet from a mason jar and used that to collect all our data.

This pulse jet allowed us to collect performance data for all our fuels in the table below. We found that methanol was the best-performing and most consistent fuel we tested.

Fuel Avg. fuel burned Avg. Time Avg. Fuel burned/ second Avg. Thrust
Methanol 0.677 g 2.03 s 0.428 g/s 10 g
Isopropyl 0.324 g 0.60 s 0.556 g/s 6 g
Ethanol 0.438 g 2.42 s 0.337 g/s 6 g
Gasoline 0.326 g 2.21 s 0.151 g/s 3 g
Naphthal 0.446 g 2.61 s 0.182 g/s 0 g