Browse Topic: Weapons systems
A joint acoustic flight test was conducted by NASA Langley Research Center and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation & Missile Center, with the goal of investigating new methods for acoustic data collection. The impetus for the effort is the anticipated growth of Urban Air Mobility and Future Vertical Lift vehicles. Many of these vehicles are expected to have distributed propulsion systems that may result in unsteady vehicle state conditions even during steady flight. This work examines the acoustic measurements collected during purposefully unsteady maneuvers performed by an MD530F helicopter. A snapshot microphone array design was deployed for this test to capture the acoustic signature on the ground from the helicopter under maneuver conditions. An analysis of the acoustic emissions indicated the presence of blade-vortex interactions, not only during the rolls towards the advancing side of the main rotor, but also rolls towards the retreating side and during
U.S. Army Combat Capability Development Command Aviation and Missile Center (DEVCOM AvMC) and Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) developed the Mission Systems Flying Testbed (MSFTB) to enable rapid evaluation of innovative technologies and integration approaches against Modular Open System Approach (MOSA) objectives. The MSFTB is a flight test capability to evaluate and demonstrate integration of mission systems to inform Army stakeholders on satisfaction of Modular Open System goals for the Army Aviation enterprise, Future Vertical Lift family of systems, and enduring aviation platforms.
Corrosion occurs in diverse environments mainly on metallic parts. Helicopters are made of a huge percentage of metallic parts and need to have several maintenance steps to guarantee its functioning and its durability. The military helicopters are flying in different kinds of environment, which cover large spectrum of severity of the atmospheric corrosion [1]. In maritime conditions, the most influencing factor is the Time of Wetness, which is a direct result Relative Humidity and Salt loading. The main material used for aircraft and that is suffering from corrosion is aluminium. There are plenty of data to follow the corrosion as a function of the environmental conditions, mainly on the sensitivity with sodium chloride, Relative Humidity, film thickness, etc... [2][3]. The maintenance efficiency on helicopters is dependent on the environmental severity. The U.S. armed forces estimate $10.2 billion in corrosion costs for their aviation and missile fleets during 2016 [4] [5] [6]. The
The use of additive manufacturing to produce rotorcraft components is challenging due to demanding material property performance requirements. The need to contend with high cycle fatigue, fretting, and vibratory loading conditions has driven our industry to use high pedigree materials that are fully characterized and with well established and understood processes to transform them into parts. No additive manufacturing processes or materials approach this level of understanding today, making it difficult to utilize the technology to manufacture components designed to be produced using conventional methods. This has limited consideration of the technology in the sustainment segment of our business. Customers have a quite different perspective. Additive manufacturing has been identified by the Department of Defense as a critical technology for the sustainment of their vehicles and weapons systems. Each branch of the military and the Defense Logistics Agency has resources and facilities
The current US DoD has recognized that their asymmetric advantage is eroding1. Adversaries have had over 25 years to counter the US playbook and weapon systems (Ref. [1]). The US Army Future Vertical Lift (FVL) programs have identified several key tenets that their airborne weapon systems need to ensure they maintain asymmetric advantage. (1) New and upgraded mission capabilities of their airborne platforms need to get to the field faster (Ref. [2]). One of the current roadblocks to achieving this is the extensive full-system regression testing that ends up being required when there are mission system changes (Ref. [3]). (2) More competition is needed to help generate "quicker, better, faster" capabilities (Ref. [4]). "Vendor lock" inherent in current system designs hinders the speed at which technology advances (Ref. [4, 5]). (3) Improved portability of mission capability across the FVL and enduring fleet (Ref. [6, 7]). The ability to more easily reuse technology will help maintain
The U.S. Army monitors the structural integrity of its rotary-wing aircraft fleet through annual evaluations and reporting via the Airframe Condition Evaluation (ACE) program. ACE evaluations capture the location and character of structural defects for each aircraft, which are then available for trending and detailed analysis by engineers with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation & Missile Center (CCDC AvMC). As analytic methods are increasingly advanced through the digital thread, CCDC AvMC has sought to improve available trending, modeling, and analysis tools beyond status quo to provide higher fidelity visuals to both aid communication with decision makers, and also to reveal structural defect trends which may not otherwise be evident. This paper will detail the development and utility of the ACE Color Mapping Application within the ACE Mapping Module and its impact on product support of U.S. Army aircraft with regard to airframe structural integrity.
The Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program is much bigger than the two ambitious high speed helicopters that Bell and Sikorsky will now get more than $1 billion to build. At least five other major moving pieces must come together on time to turn the final aircraft, whoever makes it, into a working weapon: - a new Improved Turbine Engine built by GE; - helicopter-launched mini-drones called Air Launched Effects (ALE); - a new Long-Range Precision Munition (LRPM), with the Israeli Spike-NLOS as the initial version; - an Integrated Missile Launcher (IML) to launch both the missile and the drones; - and the underlying electronic framework of standards and interfaces to plug it all together, the Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA). *Recently, FARA has added a 20mm Gatling Gun being developed by The Advanced Rotorcraft Armament and Protection System (ARAPS) program team at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Center (CCDC) Armaments Center The Army is "not
The demonstration and testing of tactile cueing is the subject of a common research undertaking by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation & Missile Center (CCDC AvMC) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The primary objective was to test a torque protection system with both a stick shaking cue generated with an attachable stick shaker and a soft stop cue generated by an active inceptor system. It was tested by five pilots in flight on the RASCAL JUH-60A helicopter and by four pilots in the ground-based simulator of the ACT/FHS (H-135) research helicopter based on a common set of high performance takeoff mission profiles. The qualitative evaluation showed that the soft stop provided a greater workload reduction than the shaker and was the preferred cue. However, a shaker cue is a promising alternative when the application of an active inceptor system is not possible.
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