Category: technology

Another Reason to Remember Zeppo Marx

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He founded Marman Products, an aerospace manufacturing firm, which purchased the patent for a new type of hose clamp, now called the Marman Clamp, which found its way onto all sorts high pressure hoses in aerospace, and were particularly useful for turbochargers, an area where the US excelled in WWII.

Additionally, they found their way into space applications, “When John Glenn rode into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, a six-foot-diameter Marman-type clamp released the capsule from the Atlas rocket, with explosive bolts blasting open the clamp,” and is still widely used today.

Neat Tech: Telescoping Ammunition Rounds….And Beer

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Telescoping rounds have always theoretically been a very useful concept: Put the round and ammunition completely within the case, with the space not taken up by the round being filled with propellant:

The idea is that when the round is fired, the ignition charge kicks the round into the barrel.

The round is more compact shorter, and the full cylindrical shape is packs more efficiently.

The devil has always been in the detail, and people have been working on this for about 30 years, and the folks at BAE Systems have apparently worked out the kinks on a 40mm autocannon:

It feeds through the trunnion, the pivot point for elevation, and then rotates 90 degrees to be inline with the barrel. This means that the feed point never moves relative to the turret, you don’t have to deal with flexible feeds.

In any case, the telescoping round allows more propellant and more explosive charge in the round, so the performance for BAE’s MTIP 2 (Manned Turret Integration Program 2) has a punch equivalent to a 50mm round, but the cannon is about the size of a 30mm cannon.

Pretty neat, and even neater is where they got their feed concepts:

The cylindrical rounds also pack more efficiently and are easier to handle, which is where the brewery comes in: BAE Systems designers visited a local brewery to gather ideas for automated storage systems and conveyors that would be used in the turret’s autoloader.

Beer, it does a cannon good.

Diamond Drops Out of Running for Thielert Purchase

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I’ve been posting a lot on the insolvency of innovative aircraft diesel manufacture and the conflict with it’s primary customer, Diamond Aircraft.

Well, it appears that their divorce is now final, with Diamond washing its hands of a bid for the engine manufacturer, and hoping for certification of its aircraft diesel in the next few months, followed by swapping out the old Thielert diesels.

Seeing as how much of the purchase price of the Thielert engine included scheduled maintenance, and now that it is in bankruptcy, it’s no longer covered, this is probably the best course of action for Diamond.

Background here.

Open Rotor Propulsion Research Getting Jump Started

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Well, the GE-SNECMA joint venture CFM gas announced that they will be working on an advanced engine for the next generation of narrow body airliner (A320 and B-737) replacements using what they call Leap-X technologies.

In addition they are teaming with NASA to apply these technoligies involved in this engine to an advanced open rotor concept (Paid Subscription Required):


It’s clearly the same no-gearbox path that GE took in the late 1980s with its “un-ducted fan”, which was killed by lower oil costs and noise concerns regarding the counter-rotating fan interaction.

The research, at least for now is about keeping the pressure ratio low on the fans to minimize noise levels.

Rolls Royce is also working on open rotor studies (Paid Subscription Required), though it’s concept is more conventional, with a gearbox.

It’s applying the EU funded DREAM research program, and will probably borrow quite a lot from the 10,000+ hp TP400 turboprop used on the A400 military transport.

One of the interesting things here is that both concepts show the same number of blades front and rear, which I think will change, because you get simultaneous interaction pulses from all the blades at once then, which means lots o’ noise.

F136 engine completes STOVL testing

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This GE-Rolls Royce competitor to the Pratt & Whitney F135 in the JSF has completed a round of tests in STOVL mode, which is generally considered the most demanding part of the engine envelope.

My guess would be the GE/RR want to get as far as possible as quickly as possible, because the Pentagon has repeatedly tried to kill the program, and it’s been Congress keeping it alive.

I have mixed emotions on the F-136. It’s clear that the F-100/F110 competition was a success in the F-15 and F-16, lowering cost and getting increased performance, but the F-110 was a derivative of the F-101 developed for the B-1 bomber, and as such the start up costs were much smaller.

Hypersonic Developments

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First, it appears that Lockheed-Martin and Boeing will collaborate on the USAF/DARPA Blackswift technology demonstrator. (see below for notational configuration)

Blackswift

Additionally, we are increasingly seeing developments world wide in hypersonics. (Paid Subscription Required)

We have had a number of relatively successful tests in Australia and the USA, and the EU is funding Lapcat II and Atllas concepts (see below), in addition to efforts by France, Italy, the UK, and Germany.


Lapcat II

The Russians are working on plasma concepts to manage the shockwave and examining their potential as control surfaces, with, “tests on a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) plasma generator in a simulated Mach 5.15”, being conducted, while the Japanese are looking at a combined cycle turbine with a cooled intake called the “S-Engine”


S-Engine

In terms of meaningful applications, I think that some sort of storable fuel, not the LH2 currently used for demonstrators, will have to be a part of the equation.

X2 Advancing Blade Helo Proceeds Toward First Flight

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Basically, the folks at Sikorski think that technological advances have made the advancing blade helicopter viable, most notably composites, active fly by wire control systems to reduce vibration, and improved propulsion (the late 1970s version X-59A ABC used two turbojets for forward thrust) (see also here)

By offloading the retreating blade, they hope to achieve cruise speeds in excess of 250 kts, and improved range.

I’m rather more sanguine on this than I am on the tilt rotor concept myself, because the tilt-rotor is really a plane that can take off vertically, while this is a helicopter that can fly faster.

It appears to have fewer compromises, and should have superior performance in the hover and low speed flight regime, which is the helicopter’s raison d’etre.

As Sikorski is self-funding this, I expect progress to be slow, they can’t afford a crash.

They’ve already pushed back first flight a couple of years from 2006, and now there is talk of pushing it back to 2009.

Also, Av Week‘s Bill Sweetman noticed a special ops mockup model of the concept at Farnborough:

Stealth Ain’t Rocket Science

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The basic physics behind it was discovered by a Russian mathemetician in the 1960s, and now we see Dassault completing a completely autonomous flight of a stealthy UAV, the AVE-D (D for discretion, stealth in French).

It’s actually a fairly impressive feat. It taxied to the runway, took off, executed a series of aerial maneuvers, landed, and taxied back to its parking space without human intervention.

Yeah, they all look pretty much the same….It’s the laws of physics that do this.

Moore’s Law* Hits AESA Radars

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It looks like manufacturers are starting to offer relatively inexpensive and low cost active, electronically-scanned array (AESA) radars as retrofits to existing aircraft. (Paid Subscription Required)

Basically, you have hundreds of solid state radars on a chip working together, and these chips are following the same trajectory as did processors and memory in the early days of the integrated circuit.

Raytheon is exhibiting its X-band Raytheon Advanced Combat Radar(RACR) at Farnborough†, which is designed to be lighter, cheaper, and require less power (and thus less cooling is required).

These radars are not up to the performance of, for example the F-22’s APG-77 radar, but they still provide a significant improvement in capability, including increased range, better resolution (with perhaps some anti-stealth capability), and the possibility of the radar being used for electronic warfare.

*Moore’s Law says that computer chips will double in power every 18 months (or 2 years depending on how you define power).
†If anyone knows of a way for me to get an all-expense-paid trip to either the Farnborough or the Paris air show, and they need a kidney….

If You Pay Them Well, They Will Graduate With Technical Degrees

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Well, here we have another article full of hand wringing about how the US is not graduating enough people with technical degrees.

The problem is very simple. We have policies like the H1B and L1 visas that depress the wages of people in technical in fields.

People inclined to go into technical fields tend to have a greater facility with math than the rest of the population.

Mathematically inclined people look at pay as a part of their career and educational choices, and they determine that there is more money, in going into law, or business administration, or medicine, or video editing, so so choose those professions.

In order for you to increase the supply of graduates with technical skills, you must increase the benefits that accrue as a result of getting those skills.

The efforts this far, which consist mostly of crap like sending astronauts around to encourage kids to take science, don’t work because they are, at their core, a lie.

Our society does not value technical expertise. It it did, it would pay more for it.

Stopped Rotor Still Being Pursued

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Boeing has been working on stopped rotor concept helos, where the rotor is stopped and functions as a wing at high speed, for years, despite the crashes of both of its prototype X-50 canard rotor wing (CRW) demonstrators.

Well, it looks like they folks at Boeing, Mesa* have come up with a a less ambitious take on this concept that has not yet crashed.

It is significantly simplified, dispensing with the tip jet power for the main rotor, and using a conventional tail rotor, and the wings pivot, so as to reduce the amount that they reduce lift during takeoff.

Here we have:

Takeoff


Transition to low speed forward flight.


High speed compound helicopter mode.


Stopped rotor

*Formerly McDonnell Douglas helicopters, formerly Hughes Helicopter. They make the Apache.

Explosive Bolt Pulled from Soyuz Docked to Space Station

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The Soyuz has had some issues with separation of the crew and re-entry modules, and so the has pulled the explosive bolt which is believed to have been responsible for the past two “anomalies”.

The failure of the joint to decouple smoothly led to two ballistic re-entries with much higher G-forces on re-entry and an off target landing.

Needless to say bringing an explosive device in for inspection, it has about the same boom as an M-80, is a non-trivial operation, and they have an explosion resistant container to transport it in once removed.

Still, I have to figure that the “pucker factor” is pretty high.

Heavy Lift Helo/Blimp Hybrid

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The idea of using balloons to make a helicopter arrangement lift more, because the rotors carry only the load, the airframe is neutrally buoyant, was tried before in the late 1986s, with the Piasecki PA-97, but it was a shoestring job with a seat of the pants attitude towards engineering, and on its maiden flight, a helo broke lose, and destroyed the aircraft, killing one of the 4 pilots.

This Boeing /Skyhook joint venture appears to be more thought out, and it offers good performance, with an estimated 200 mile range with a 40t payload.

That being said, I have always said that the first problem with lighter than air craft is that landing, even in a mild wind, becomes problematic.

When you consider that this is designed for operations in the, “niche market of commercial oil and mining companies operating in Canada’s far north,” I would also add the problem of operations in inclement weather.

I would also note that the cost of helium is going through the roof (been to a party supply store lately?), which will further crimp the project.

Saab Offers Supercruising Stealth to South Korea

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The ROK (South Korea) is looking at fielding its own advanced combat aircraft (Paid Subscription Required), EADS is pushing a Typhoon pushed somewhere past tranche 3, and SAAB is pushing a new stealth supercruiser, Boeing is pitching a significantly updated F-15, while Lockheed-Martin is pitching the F-35.

This is in parallel to the (IMHO overambitious) indiginous KFX stealth fighter program.

SAAB is proposing both a one and a two engine variant.

Honestly, the only two I see likely are the F-35 and Boeing’s proposal. The former because it is the 800 lb gorilla in the room, and the latter because they are currently taking shipments of the F-15K.

Note that in the competition that selected the F-15K, the Rafale was widely rumored to have won, but the fact that it was not a US product led to the selection of the Eagle.


Boeing Proposal


SAAB’s P106 Supercruiser