Corrosion is a deforming process that costs the United States Department of Defense (DOD) approximately $23 billion annually and accounts for 23% of all DOD maintenance. Exhaustive efforts have been made towards the detection and diagnosis of this issue; however, the problem persists. The Army’s “Go Green” initiative has opened the door for research into an environmentally friendly, biologically based corrosion monitoring technique. For this reason, novel research is being conducted on the use of lipid layers in corrosion monitoring.

The simplistic definition of UAV reads like this:

“An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), colloquially known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot on board. Its flight is controlled either autonomously by computers in the vehicle, or under the remote control of a pilot on the ground or in another vehicle.”

Fixed and tactical information networking, especially for defense applications, has begun to require increasing data transmission capacity as the volume of information available to warfighters grows through more sophisticated sensors and capabilities. The breadth of the information grid is growing beyond the capacity of radio frequency (RF) or microwave broadband direct line of sight (DLoS) links. RF systems in particular are gridlocked by a congested spectrum, can be limited by licensing issues, and in hostile environments, can be jammed.

The production of composite parts relies on an ever increasing number of processing technologies which have a large impact on the performance of the part. The manufacturing step, or processing, is usually optimized for specific materials by using process simulation tools. Commonly used technologies are injection molding, injection-compression molding, compression molding, fiber draping or placement software. All of these approaches are applied in combination with short, long, and continuous fiber reinforced plastics for additional strength. Composite materials are heavily influenced by the processes used to create the part, which can lead to non-uniform material behavior throughout the final manufactured part, adding another challenge to the design process.

In late May, Logos Technologies delivered the first payload upgrade to the Kestrel wide-area sensor, employed on U.S. Navy and Army aerostats in Afghanistan. The new hardware will provide better image stability, increased system reliability, and easier maintenance of Kestrel units already in the field.

CTI Electronics, a supplier of rugged computer peripheral and motion control devices to US armed forces for over 20 years, will manufacture a military-grade, industrial pointing device to retrofit the Navy’s fleet of cruisers and destroyers. In cooperation with Lockheed Martin, CTI is producing the NEMA 4X (IP66) sealed handheld Industrial Mouse™ in a stainless steel enclosure.

Raytheon Company (RTN) has started delivering a new release of software, Post Deployment Build-7 (PDB-7), to its worldwide Patriot customer base. The Patriot air and missile defense system protects against advanced threats, including aircraft, tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Robots have been employed by the military to assist in missions where it would be, and has been, too dangerous to have a human being take on the task. These robots can detect and disable bombs. Some can be thrown into rooms where they land on their “feet”, and scan the room for counter-insurgents. Others blow up mine fields, to ensure safe travel of ground vehicles and the personnel they carry.

Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions (Ashburn, VA), a business group of Curtiss-Wright Controls, has introduced the newest member of its Fabric40(TM) family of extremely high-speed 40 Gbps OpenVPX™modules. The new VPX6-6802 Fabric40 Switch is the first rugged, high performance 6U OpenVPX (VITA 65) switch card to provide support for 10/20/40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and SDR/DDR/QDR/FDR-10 InfiniBand®(IB) connectivity to OpenVPX™ systems. Systems built using the VPX6-6802 and complementary Curtiss-Wright Fabric40 system elements will deliver over 2x the performance of previous generation SRIO Gen-2-based systems and 4x the performance of 10 GbE-based systems. The fully rugged VPX6-6802 is available in air-, conduction-, and air flow-through (AFT)-cooled configurations. Designed for use with today’s highest speed switched fabrics, the board provides a combined Data Plane and Control Plane high-performance switch for 6U VPX systems.

Mouser Electronics, Inc. (Mansfield, TX) now stocks International Rectifier’s (IR) family of AEC-Q101 Automotive qualified 40V N-channel MOSFETs, featuring IR’s proven Gen12.7 trench technology with ultra-low R_ds(on). International Rectifier's Automotive COOLiRFET™ Power MOSFETs target rugged automotive applications. These HEXFET® Power MOSFETs achieve very low on-resistance, resulting in highly efficient switching of high current signals with very little power loss. Additional features include a high 175°C junction temperature, fast switching speeds for better power efficiency, and a high repetitive avalanche rating for harsh signal environments. These new devices offer low conduction losses and robust avalanche performance to deliver higher efficiency, power density and reliability. Applications using these new IR COOLiRFET™ devices from Mouser Electronics can run significantly cooler than comparable MOSFETs.