Well I am wrong turn out the near space drone is something else Here is Henri take on the subject
From his twitter account
The hypersonic drone (or simply high supersonic) designed by the 611 Chengdu Institute that I had mentioned in a few of my articles could have passed the major milestone of design certification. To confirm
Exclusive: the Chinese hypersonic drone finally revealed?
BY
It has been almost a year since I have a lot of interest in the development of the Chinese hypersonic drone. As you can see, several of my last articles published here on East Pendulum are about this machine of which one is certain of its existence, but apart from a public satellite image which is practically unusable and many NOTAMs which suggest the dates of test, no official image or technical details have been revealed so far.
This morning, after an umpteenth failure to try to locate the advanced P-Band ballistic warning radar, which has just been admitted to active service in the Chinese Air Force at the end of September, I curled up in the file. of the Chinese space shuttle "
Ao Tian 1 ".
When I reviewed the 37 patents associated with the project that I was able to gather so far, it put me on the same track for the Chinese hypersonic drone.
Why not try this angle?
And it is with the method of "net fishing" and especially a little elbow grease that the name of 11 researchers and engineers of the 611 Institute in Chengdu, a subsidiary of the AVIC group, has been identified. These names then debauched on 5 patents that seem to be directly related, or indirectly, to the project of the drone in question.
Two of these five patents are particularly interesting because they might show us for the first time what the famous hypersonic UAV conceived by Chengdu looks like.
Here are some excerpts -
Patent extract of a multi-layer thermal insulation for "high-speed cruising vehicle in near space"
Extract from the patent of a GSE dedicated to a "machine of large surface area"
The description of the patent, shown in the second image, indicates that the GSE (Ground Support Equipment) was designed for a craft that is launched through another flying platform. This point confirms the hypothesis that we have seen in the previous articles - the Chinese hypersonic drone can not take off alone on the runway and must first be hung up on a carrier, such as an
H-6 bomber , before being dropped and then igniting its own propulsion.
Shenlong Mini Shuttle from the 611 Institute in Chengdu
This launch mode has already been seen on another
Shenlong Chinese mini shuttle , also designed by Chengdu.
The text specifies that the ground personnel are not allowed to walk on the cell and the wing of the machine because the materials which constitute it are "specific". The GSE that we see in the image was invented to facilitate inspection and attachment of the drone under another plane.
The presence of two hooks on the cell indicates that the machine is rather hooked under the carrier, and as it has a vertical empennage, it is more likely that it is placed under the wing of its carrier aircraft.
In this case, if we still assume that the H-6 bomber is the (only) possible choice, then the drone should not weigh more than 3 tons overall, given the carrying capacity of the Chinese bomber.
As for the thermal insulation in the first image, it consists of 4 layers of different materials - an insulation, a reflector, a fire-resistant layer and another insulating fabric. It serves to reduce the overall mass of the drone by providing a lighter thermal control solution on particular areas.
These two patents were filed on December 11, 2015, which is consistent with the supposed date of the first drone flight on September 9, 2015.
Now, if the patent on the multi-layer thermal insulation has not given us any indication on the temperature that the hypersonic drone must undergo in flight, another patent on the cone of the forward tip of a "hypersonic flying machine", filed by the same group of researchers of the two patents at the top, seems to contain this information.
In fact, the cone with integrated atmospheric sensors has been manufactured with materials that can withstand a temperature "above 1,200 ° C". A flexible fabric made with Al203 ceramic fiber then covers the interior of the cone.
The part numbered "1" represents the object of the patent and seems to be mounted on a kind of rocket serving as a test bench. As this patent was filed in November 2014, it is reasonable to believe that the cone, designed by the group of researchers who filed the other patents related to the hypersonic drone, is also part of the project and was first tested separately on a small rocket, because this is where the heat stagnation zone should be located.
Without having the exact shape of the drone, neither the altitude at which it evolves nor the angle of incident of the flight, it seems difficult to establish a relation between the supported temperature, 1,200 ° C here, and the maximum speed of the machine.
But we know for example that, according to
, a machine flying at Mach 6 undergoes a temperature of 1,027 ° C at 100km altitude, or 2,027 ° C at 10km of altitude. altitude.
If the first two images above really represent the Chinese hypersonic drone we are looking for, then it should fly between 20 and 30km above sea level because of its large wing area. By extrapolating the data from the Virginia document, we are almost certain that the Chinese machine is flying under Mach 6. We are therefore, according to the classification used by NASA, still in the field of supersonic and not hypersonic.
But in Chinese academic documents, and even in the first article of CAN News that revealed the existence of the project (removed from the web since), the word "hypersonic" is still used to qualify this machine, so we will keep this naming for continuity of articles. It must be kept in mind that in all cases, the speed of the said Chinese drone should be between Mach 3 and Mach 5 at most, as already pointed out in my previous articles (see appendix).
As for the type of missions that the Chinese army will entrust to this hypersonic drone, we can maintain the hypothesis that it would be a machine of recognition, mainly optical, if we believe in the several research documents written. by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
For example, in the document entitled "
" which was submitted for approval on July 15, 2014, we learn that researchers from the National Laboratory of Aerial Optical Imaging were working on the deformation of the camera lens, installed on a flying machine at "Mach high" and 25km altitude.
The text analyzes the deformation of camera lenses of a size of 340mm x 406mm x 23mm (and 11.5mm) during three phases of flight - Powered Ascension, Powered Cruise, and Unpowered Return.
The simulations show that the outside temperature of the camera lens is 236 ° C when "the craft is in the middle of its cruising phase, at the 600th second".
:enjoy:
