It’s about speed, and Sandia National Laboratories, with a hypersonic wind tunnel and advanced laser diagnostic technology, is in a position to help U.S. defense agencies understand the physics associated with aircraft flying five times the speed of sound. With potential adversaries reporting successes in their own programs to develop aircraft that can be flown at Mach 5 or greater speeds, U.S. development of autonomous hypersonic systems is a top defense priority. That has made aerospace engineer Steven Beresh of Sandia’s aerosciences department and his colleagues at the hypersonic wind tunnel popular lately.

Northrop Grumman Corporation
Falls Church, VA
703-280-2900
www.northropgrumman.com

The Northrop Grumman Corporation-developed Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) Battle Command System (IBCS) successfully demonstrated its ability to scale up and network across long distances during a recent U.S. Army-led test. The evaluation was conducted by U.S. Army soldiers over a five-week period with air and missile defense assets located at sites in New Mexico, Texas and Alabama.

NASA spacecraft typically rely on human-controlled radio systems to communicate with Earth. As collection of space data increases, NASA looks to alternative radio technologies to meet demand and increase efficiency.

Military vehicles play a vital role in protecting our society — and inevitably encounter many extreme conditions across their lifespan. From the varying weight, to the rough terrain, there is a lot that can go wrong. Military steering systems must therefore be engineered to take on such extremes. This begins at the design stage and ends with analysis through testing. It's here the parts are tested to their limits and validated against the original specification and real-life requirements.

Round TFT LCD Displays

Data Image (Winter Park, FL) has announced new round TFT LCD color displays in two sizes: 3" and 4.2" in diameter. They can be used as digital avionics, power meters, speedometers, rpm gauges, temperature indicators, strain gauges, volt/current meters or a simple clock. The display can show a single gauge or display multiple parameters. The formats for the displays are 432 × 432 for the 3" and 720 × 720 for the 4.2". Both have a brightness of 1000 nits typical and wide viewing angles thanks to the IPS glass technology used on both versions. Both have wide temperature rating. They are available with or without capacitive touch panels for user interface.

FLIR Systems, Inc.
Wilsonville, OR
1-800-254-0630
www.flir.com/IBAC2

FLIR Systems, Inc. announced recently that it has received a delivery order for FLIR IBAC™ 2 biological agent detector systems to support the United States (U.S.) Forces Korea (USFK). The delivery order is under a 10-year indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract in support of the Joint United States Forces Korea Portal and Integrated Threat Recognition (JUPITR) program led by the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense (JPEO-CBD). The order is valued at $4 million with deliveries beginning in July 2018.

Arnold Defense
St. Louis, MO
636-575-9190
www.arnolddefense.com

Arnold Defense, the St Louis based international manufacturer and supplier of 2.75-inch rocket launchers, recently announced the commencement of initial low-rate production of their “FLETCHER” land-based, 2.75-inch/70 mm weapon system. The FLETCHER system can just as easily be mounted on military vehicles as well as base defense platforms.

New and powerful projection based augmented reality (AR) technology is transforming the way products — ranging from turbine engines to pacemakers — are made, while dramatically streamlining and error-proofing the manufacturing and assembly process.

The process of determining the ideal plasma treatment that will resolve a challenging bonding or adhesion issue is an exact science, often the domain of chemists and physicists.

You can learn a lot from a blast tube when you couple blast experiments with computer modeling. Sandia National Laboratories researchers are using a blast tube configurable to 120 feet to demonstrate how well nuclear weapons could survive the shock wave of a blast from an enemy weapon and to help validate the modeling.