Stealth performance evaluation of helicopter against airborne early warning radar considering trimming control

Airborne pulse Doppler radar is a key threat to the military helicopter,and assessing the stealth performance of helicopter against airborne early warning radar is helpful to the helicopter’s stealth design and operational planning.In this paper,the Shooting and Bouncing Ray(SBR)and Uniform Theory of Diffraction(UTD)based high-frequency algorithms are used to calculate the Radar Cross Section(RCS)of helicopter,and the radar range equations are used to evaluate the stealth performance.In order to account for the effects of rotor flapping motions during actual flight,the aerodynamics model of whole helicopter is established and the attitudes and controls of helicopter at different flight states are trimmed and input into the RCS calculation module.The effects of helicopter flight speed,flying direction and operational environment on radar stealth performance are studied in focus.It is demonstrated by the results that the trimming control does have a great influence of more than 5 dB on the RCS of helicopter,and the introduction of the trim calculation brings the helicopter’s returns calculation closer to the reality.Variations in flight speed lead to the changes in the stealth performance of helicopter against Early Warning Aircraft(EWA),and the helicopter flight speed can be planned according to the operational requirements to minimize exposure distance or exposure time.Variations in flying direction mainly affect the detection properties of helicopter returns,and flying in the same direction with EWA usually gives the helicopter better low-observability than flying head-on.Variations in operational environment mainly affect the radar detection performance and the sensitivity of the detection performance to external factors;the same amount of change in some external factor causes a different amount of change in the helicopter’s detectability in different environments.

Numerical study of a trapezoidal bypass dual throat nozzle

Bypass Dual Throat Nozzle(BDTN)is a novel type of fluidic thrust vectoring nozzle.To improve the infrared stealth performance of BDTN,a nozzle based on BDTN is proposed and numerically simulated.Each cross-section along the x-axis of the novel nozzle becomes a trapezoid,which is named“BDTN-TRA.”The main numerical simulation results show that BDTN-TRA can produce a thrust vectoring angle when the upper or lower bypass valve is open.The angle difference between the two conditions mentioned above is usually approximately 1°-2°.Even if the two bypasses are closed,BDTN-TRA can produce a small thrust vectoring angle at around 3°-5°.When the sidewall angle increases from 60°to 90°,the thrust coefficient and thrust vectoring angle under each work condition usually decrease.A larger aspect ratio indicates better performance.As the aspect ratio increases over 7.2,the performance of BDTN-TRA is quite close to that of BDTN with rectangular cross-sections at the same aspect ratio.These features will benefit the control and trimming for future aircraft design,especially for the flying wing layout aircraft.Last but not least,BDTN-TRA has a more extraordinary mixing performance compared with BDTN.The distributions of static temperature and axial velocity along the x-axis of BDTN-TRA with sidewall angle of 60°decrease faster than those of BDTN.When the total temperature of the inlet equals 1600 K,the static temperature difference between BDTN-TRA with sidewall angles of 60°and 90°is over 360 K at twice the length of the nozzle downstream of the nozzle exit,which is the reflection for excellent infrared stealth for the fighter.