Contact: Bob Ratliff
Casting their eyes on the far horizons and beyond, scientists at Mississippi State are helping develop an on-board power system for future air force weaponry.
The university's Center for Advanced Energy Conversion is beginning a $4.6 million, five-year project to design and construct the prototype of a lightweight, high-output power supply for a new generation of aircraft armaments. MSU is part of a national team selected for the U. S. Air Force's Hypersonic Vehicle Electric Power System project.
"HVEPS will provide a short pulse of high-powered electrical output to fire laser, microwave or particle beam weapons," said center director Robert L. Cook.
General Atomics, a San Diego, Calif.-based defense contractor, leads the effort to produce the on-board weapons power system for futuristic aircraft capable of traveling approximately 11,000 miles an hour--Mach 15, in aerospace jargon-and reaching any world location in two hours.
The desired system must be capable of producing large amounts of electricity. How large? Keeping in mind that one megawatt is equal to one million watts of electrical power, the goal here is 10 megawatts.
"The ultimate use for the HVEPS aboard these aircraft will be to power weapons used for missile interception," Cook explained. "The systems also will supply power for disrupting communications and performing radar surveillance."
In addition to Cook, MSU team members include research engineers Perry Norton and Walter Okhuysen, aerospace engineering professor Keith Koenig, and professor C.F. Su and assistant professor David Ermer of physics. Cook is the principal investigator for the MSU phase of the project.
The Mississippi State team is developing a magnetohydrodynamics--MHD, for short-generator that can produce large amounts of power with no moving parts, something MSU researchers have demonstrated during more than two decades of internationally recognized laboratory work.
"An MHD power train consists of a high temperature conductive gas, or plasma, moving through a magnetic field," Cook said. "It is the moving conductor in a magnetic field that produces electric power."
In addition to the design and construction of a power train, Cook and his MSU colleagues are being called on to:
--Develop instruments to monitor the power train,
--Evaluate materials for its component,
--Fabricate a high-temperature, high-velocity test bed for appraising materials and collecting data, and, last but not least,
--Use supercomputers to produce working simulations of the device.
For the next five years, these Mississippi scientists will be very, very busy.