PLAN Catapult Development Thread, News, etc.

T

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
Ma Weiming's latest paper stated that CV-18 uses EM arrestor, no water twister involved as I have posted here #9,203
This is the official confirmation.

1693432795208.png

In 1), it says CV Fujian is equiped with advanced EM launcher and arrestor.
In 2), it says EM arrestor consists absorption and transmission (cabling), arresting motor, emergy conversion (to electricity) and control system ...... compared with "water twister arresting technology" ......
1693433198513.png
 
by78

by78

General
Two undated satellite images of the catapult R&D facility in Shanghai. That's large pool of water at the end of the catapult track.

53358285928_fe1dee98f5_k.jpg
53358285938_5f1b32c561_k.jpg
 
T

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
I am very surprised that many posts here saying that CV-18 uses supercapacitor as energy storage system. So I searched around and find that this notion is popular by many internet posters after CV-18's cat test.

The fact is that we only have official paper by Ma Weiming stating that his EM cat chooses flywheel. There is nothing else. So the notion of supercapacitor is for the moment baseless.

Members here should avoid spreading it without any new evidence to keep the standard of this forum high. At least people should put the notion as a question in the forum instead of taking it as a fact.
 
T

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
Temstar said:
I watched the live stream, first 1.5 hour is on carrier catapult history, PLAN history with catapults is in the last hour.
There were two points that were pretty interesting:

1. Acquiring HMAS Melbourne and its BS4 steam catapult was actually quite the unexpected windfall for PLAN, the BS4 was studied in detail and had the two earlier attempts at building carrier not being cancelled they may have been equipped with BS4 clones or derived steam catapults. Shilao showed off an internal manual (he double checked to make sure the book had a RRP, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to show this manual on air) from his collection with a section on workings of BS4:
View attachment 122099
At the time it would seem neither RAN nor UK or US thought China would go onto develop carriers and so didn't bother to remove the catapults from HMAS Melbourne. If something like the sale happened today they wouldn't make that mistake.

2. While reading through the last few pages with people saying Fujian's EM cats are powered by supercapacitors I recall having seen somewhere that that's not actually the case, and that Fujian's EM cats are in fact powered by flywheels too. In fact I recall somewhere on Weibo someone had a pretty official looking table listing the pros and cons between flywheel vs supercapacitors and it wasn't clear cut that supercapacitors are better. The team did specify in the stream that Fujian uses flywheels for the EM cats.
Click to expand...
Maybe this is the table, it is from Ma Weiming's paper from 2016. I marked them in color, Orange: forbiding factors. Green: desirable. Blue: acceptable. It is clear that supercapacitor in the 2016s are not suitable for EM cat due to its low reliability, frequent need to replace and repair, short life. Some of the factors are unlikely going to improve over time because they are inheret disadvantages of supercapacitor (chemical degradation).

1701372963255.png
 
W

WhiteBeardEdward

New Member
Registered Member
is anyone got a link of article or video that can debunk the myth of conventional power cant use EMALS only nuclear power can?
 
G

gelgoog

Brigadier
Registered Member
That trite argument. An EMALS setup should be more energetically efficient than a similar steam catapult at converting energy to motion. If anything you should need less power to operate it. Not more. And yet there were plenty of conventionally powered carriers with steam catapults.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top