HII Wins Navy Planning Yard Contract Worth a Potential $724 Million - Seapower

Sur le même sujet

• 

  14 août 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  Precooler Technology Could Bring Advantages To Fighter Engines

  By Tony Osborne Technology developed by Britain's Reaction Engines for its SABRE (Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine) hypersonic powerplant is to be fitted on the Eurojet EJ200 engine from a Eurofighter Typhoon to understand if the technology can help transform the powerplant's operating envelope. The £10 million ($12 million) project announced by the Royal Air Force (RAF) Rapid Capability Office (RCO) in July will see BAE Systems, Reaction Engines and Rolls-Royce engineers work to better comprehend Reaction's precooler technology and how it could be integrated for use on a jet engine—perhaps even the powerplant for Britain's future combat aircraft, the Tempest. Two-year project will scope integration to better understand precooler potential benefits Heat exchanger is an enabler for Reaction Engines' SABRE technology The trials represent the first acknowledged application of the precooler technology At high speed, jet engines struggle with a thermal challenge as air entering the intake becomes too hot, reducing thrust and limiting the ability to reach speeds beyond Mach 3. Reaction's precooler, essentially a highly efficient heat exchanger, already has proven its ability to quench megawatts of heat energy from the incoming air. Trials in the U.S. have shown the precooler technology to cool intake airflow from more than 800F (426C) to around 212F in just 1/20th of a second, helping to maximize performance. Applied to a fighter engine, the precooler could allow it to work more efficiently at high speeds but also enable manufacturers to be less reliant on exotic, expensive and heat-resistant materials such as titanium. This could lead to lower costs in terms of purchase and maintenance, which are both key focuses of Britain's Future Combat Air System Technology Initiative (FCAS TI). The goal of the FCAS TI is to research and develop new technologies that can be spiraled into Britain's Eurofighter Typhoons and Lockheed Martin F-35s, but also potentially featured in a combat aircraft to replace the Typhoon in the 2030s. “This is Phase 1 of something more,” Air Vice Marshal, Simon “Rocky” Rochelle, chief of staff for capability and the brainchild behind the RAF's RCO, said at the Royal International Air Tattoo, where the contract was signed. “There is something here that needs to be explored, investigated, tested and tried.” Over the next two years, engineers will study how the precooler can be integrated onto the EJ200. Once this is established, the engine and precooler will be ground-tested together. “This isn't about a new market for EJ200. We are using existing assets to try and address that heat challenge,” Conrad Banks, Rolls-Royce's chief engineer for future defense programs, tells Aviation Week. “If you can cool the intake air down, suddenly you can expand the flight envelope of your gas turbine and it introduces some exciting supersonic and hypersonic applications.” There is no suggestion the UK is looking for a hypersonic fighter, especially with the high costs associated with the airframe alone. Nonetheless, the technology could enable higher supercruise performance—sustained supersonic flight without the use of afterburner, or more simply better fuel economy. “What we will do on the testbed is assess the drop in temperature and then see how that affects the core of the engine, that then validates our model. . . . This is not about massively changing the engine,” Banks explains. How the precooler could be fitted to the engine is also part of the scope of the study. One option could be a donut-like configuration around the intake, Banks suggests. The work also will consider how the introduction of a precooler affects the rest of the airframe and whether such an installation is affordable. The precooler fitted to the EJ200 will be “designed and scaled to the engine to match its performance,” says Banks. As Banks describes it, the technology will not change the low-observability aspects of the platform such as the engine's infrared signature, pointing out that will depend on what is done on the back end of the engine. However, officials note such a heat exchanger also could be mounted to the rear of the engine. For Reaction Engines, the trials build on its lightweight heat exchanger (HTX) experiments, which were conducted in Colorado and used a J79 engine from an F-4 Phantom to feed the precooler. The technology is key to the company's SABRE concept, which is targeted at air-breathing hypersonic and space access vehicles. In this role, the engine is designed to efficiently extract oxygen from the atmosphere for rocket combustion. In the fully integrated SABRE, the chilled air will be passed from the HTX to a turbo-compressor and into the rocket thrust chamber, where it will be burned with sub-cooled liquid hydrogen fuel. Reaction Engines has raised over £100 million in the last three years from public and private sources. In addition, the UK government in 2013 announced a £60 million commitment to assist with the demonstrator engines. Strategic investments also have been made at BAE Systems in 2015 and more recently in 2018 by Rolls-Royce and by Boeing's capital venture arm, HorizonX. https://aviationweek.com/defense/precooler-technology-could-bring-advantages-fighter-engines

• 

  16 novembre 2023 | International, Naval

  RTX's Pratt & Whitney receives sustainment contract valued up to $870 million for TF33 engines powering B-52s, E-3s

  This agreement is a culmination of the Defense Logistics Agency's decades-long partnership with the 448th Supply Chain Management Wing, Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., and Pratt & Whitney to establish...

• 

  3 février 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  The drive to advance missile defense is there, but there must be funding

  By: Richard Matlock Over the past five years, missile threats have evolved far more rapidly than conventional wisdom had predicted. Best known is North Korea's accelerated development and testing of sophisticated, road-mobile ballistic missiles. But the U.S. National Defense Strategy requires renewed focus on greater powers. China has adopted an anti-access strategy consisting of new offensive missiles, operational tactics and fortifications in the South China Sea. Russia, too, has developed highly maneuverable hypersonic missiles specifically designed to defeat today's defenses. Grappling with these sobering realities demands change. The 2019 Missile Defense Review called for a comprehensive approach to countering regional missiles of all kinds and from whatever source, as well as the increasingly complex intercontinental ballistic missiles from rogue states. But programs and budgets have not yet aligned with the policy. The upcoming defense budget submission presents an important opportunity to address these new and complex challenges. The Missile Defense Agency's current top three goals are sustaining the existing force, increasing capacity and capability, and addressing more advanced threats. The first two are necessary but insufficient. The third goal must be elevated to adapt U.S. missile defense efforts to the geopolitical and technological realities of our time. For the last decade, less than 2 percent of MDA's annual funding has been dedicated to developing advanced technology, during which time our adversaries have begun outpacing us. As President Donald Trump said last January, we “cannot simply build more of the same, or make incremental improvements.” Adapting our missile defense architecture will require rebalance, discipline and difficult choices. Realigning resources to develop advanced technologies and operational concepts means investing less in single-purpose systems incapable against the broader threat. It also requires we accept and manage new kinds of risk. Indeed, meeting the advanced threat may, in the short term, require accepting some strategic risk with North Korea. The beginning of this rebalance requires more distributed, elevated and survivable sensors capable of tracking advanced threats. The most important component here is a proliferated, globally persistent space layer in low-Earth orbit consisting of both passive and active sensors. MDA may be the missile defense-centric organization best suited to developing and integrating this capability into the architecture, but there is considerable opportunity for partnering with others to move out smartly, as recently urged by Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten. Partnerships with the Space Development Agency and the Air Force can be supplemented by collaborative efforts with commercial space companies. We need not do this all at once. Space assets could be fielded in phases, with numbers, capability (sensors, interceptors, lasers), missions, and orbits evolving over time. MDA demonstrated a similar paradigm with the Delta experiments, Miniature Sensor Technology Integration series and the Near Field Infrared Experiment in the past. Meanwhile, other sensors could alleviate the cost of building new, billion-dollar radar on islands in the Pacific Ocean — efforts which continue to suffer delay. Adding infrared tracking sensors to high-altitude drones, for instance, has already been demonstrated experimentally in the Indo-Pacific theater with modified Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles. These need not be dedicated assets. Sensor pod kits could be stored in theater to be deployed aboard Reapers or other platforms during heightened tensions. We must revisit boost-phase defenses and directed energy. In 2010, the Airborne Laser program demonstrated that lasers could destroy missiles in the boost phase, but deploying toxic chemical lasers aboard large commercial aircraft was fiscally and operationally untenable. Fortunately, considerable operational promise exists with recently developed solid-state lasers (the cost of which is around $2 of electricity per shot). We must move these systems out of the laboratory and build and test operational prototypes. Near-term actions to better manage risk against the rogue-state ballistic missile threat must not overtake the pursuit of these larger goals. Although the Pentagon is currently considering a 10-year, $12 billion program for a next-generation interceptor, nearer-term, cheaper options are available. Replacing each existing kill vehicle on the Ground-Based Interceptors with several smaller kill vehicles would multiply each interceptor's effectiveness dramatically. The U.S. has been developing this technology since 2006, including a “hover” flight test in 2009. Affordable solutions like this must be found. Missile defense cannot do it all. Denying, degrading and destroying enemy missile systems prior to launch must be part of the mix. But left-of-launch activities can be expensive and difficult, and reliance on a cyber magic wand carries risk, too. We need to broaden our approach to attack all parts of our adversary's kill chain. The National Defense Strategy urges that we contend with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be — or as it previously was. To meet the threats of today and tomorrow, we must radically transform our U.S. missile defenses. It falls to the 2021 budget to do so. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/01/31/the-drive-to-advance-missile-defense-is-there-but-there-must-be-funding/