Thales Group
Cedex, France
+ 33(0)1 57 77 86 26
www.thalesgroup.com

The United States Air Force's (USAF) activities to establish air superiority and support ground combat units often require the use of secure airfields in remote and challenging areas. Thales Deployable – Instrument Landing System (D-ILS), a compact and movable variant of the standard ILS, can help them accomplish this mission.

This project seeks to reproduce the neural circuits used by the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans for locomotion. Caenorhabditis elegans is a small (~1.2 millimeter) nematode found in rotting fruit in many parts of the world. It feeds on bacteria and is neither parasitic nor pathogenic. Although capable of sexual reproduction, most laboratory strains reproduce primarily as self-fertilizing hermaphrodites, with each adult hermaphrodite producing approximately 300 progeny (Figure 1).

With the exception of thermal storage heat sinks, the term heat sink is a misnomer. Standard heat sinks for electronics cooling are actually heat exchangers, taking the heat from the electronics, and transferring it to a fluid, either air or coolant. Phase Change Material (PCM) heat sinks are the only heat sinks that actually act as a (temporary) sink for heat. They are emerging in the thermal management realm to solve thermal problems in systems where active solutions cannot be used. When there is no place to dissipate the heat generated by electric components, a PCM heat sink is capable of absorbing the generated waste heat ^[1] .

Strategies to control solid rocket propellant regression rate require a robust throttling technique applicable to high performance propellant formulations. Currently, several methods to control and throttle either motors or subscale propellant strands exist, including chamber pressure control (e.g. pintle nozzles or rapid depressurization quench), infrared laser irradiation of the burning surface to increase burning rates, development of inherently unstable combustion chamber geometries (producing either local pressure or velocity perturbations), and electrically sensitive hydroxylammonium nitrate (HAN)-based formulations in which burning rate is controlled by a voltage potential. However, these techniques are limited in that they either can only be used with low flame temperature (low specific impulse) propellants, result in low propulsion system mass fraction (pintle), are only capable of producing a single perturbation, or are formulation specific.

The development of sensors to assist helicopter landing in degraded visual environments (DVEs) is currently an important US Army requirement addressing the Survivability of Future Vertical Lift Platforms program, one of the Army's modernization priorities.

Much debate surrounds the skills shortage burdening the manufacturing sector of aerospace and defense (A&D). Industry 4.0, the Baby Boomer retirement wave, and a lack of properly trained workers underpins this issue, and while it's widely acknowledged, there's no clearly defined way to address it.

State-of-the-art electronic and optoelectronic devices require electronic materials with specialized properties that cannot be characterized with standard methods, or that must be characterized with extra precision. As a result of this research, the following new materials characterization methods have been developed:

Worldwide demand for low Earth orbit satellites is increasing at an unprecedented pace, driven by diverse needs such as faster and more affordable Internet access, and faster revisit rates with finer resolution for imaging data. The satellite payload instruments performing communications or imaging functions are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable and require the collection of increasing amounts of telemetry data to ensure the safe and reliable operation of the satellite.

Lightning strikes to jet airliners are common - about once every 1000 flight hours. The DO-160G standard, Environmental Conditions and Test Procedures for Airborne Equipment, is a standard for the environmental testing of avionics hardware. Many airplane manufacturers specify DO-160G Section 22, lightning induced transient susceptibility, as a requirement for critical systems like guidance, radars, communications, engine control, and heat and air controls. Aircraft fuselage, wing and tail flight controls, wing tips, fin tips, engine nacelles, and landing gear are the areas most likely to be hit by lightning strikes.

As performance capabilities for embedded computing products expand, the requirements for commercial-grade and MIL ruggedized systems blur into similar specifications. There are increasing demands to take feature-rich, successful industrial/commercial enclosure systems into MIL or other harsh environment applications. Similarly, engineers are designing up-front computing platforms that they can expand into harsher environments.