Browse Topic: Vehicles, Equipment, and Performance
Modern combat helmets improve wearer survivability through preventing ballistic penetration via delamination or deformation of the shell material. However, this deformation may impinge upon the skull and present a risk of behind-helmet blunt trauma (BHBT). While legacy aramid helmets from the late 1970s–1980s inform current NIJ testing standards, the advent of lower areal density ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) and modern suspensions may incur unknown changes that present an unknown effect on BHBT risk. This study investigates whether current standards relying on a peak acceleration threshold and residual clay deformation may not reflect changes in deformation geometry seen in newer shell materials and suspension designs. Thirty-eight helmets categorized into three groups, older aramid, newer aramid (with new suspension), and prototype UHMWPE (with old suspension), were mounted on Hybrid III ATD head-necks and impacted on the temporal surface with 9 mm NATO projectiles at velocities between 388 and 482 m/s. Flash x-ray imaging captured deformation geometry. Deformations were digitized to measure maximum depth, volume, and surface area recruited. Multiple linear regression identified the influence of shell material and suspension on geometry. Results indicated that shell material significantly affected deformation volume and area (p < 0.05). Notably, UHMWPE exhibited a qualitatively more “pointed” deformation profile compared to aramid, recruiting material differently as depth increased. In contrast, suspension type and helmet design did not significantly influence deformation geometry. These findings suggest that the BHBT geometry in UHMWPE helmets differs fundamentally from aramid helmets. As UHMWPE helmets encounter higher-energy threats, current acceleration threshold or depth-based standards may not fully capture the risk of skull fracture. To future-proof helmet validation, testing standards should evolve beyond current standards to include area recruitment and other geometric measures.
Letter from the Guest Editors
Space membrane structures, prized for their lightness, affordability, and ability to fold and unfold, hold immense promise for missions like deep space exploration, high-definition Earth observation, and advanced satellite communications. However, these structures are typically large-size, ultra-lightweight, highly flexible, and have very low damping. This leads to complex dynamic behavior featuring significant geometric nonlinearity, strong coupling between rigid and flexible motions, and uncertain parameters. Consequently, creating accurate yet simple mathematical models for designing controllers is exceptionally difficult, and traditional control methods that rely on such models often fall short. To tackle this problem, this study focuses on a membrane antenna spacecraft equipped with cable actuators, aiming to suppress its vibrations during attitude maneuvers. Using the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm, an intelligent vibration controller based on the Actor-Critic architecture is designed. This approach is data-driven, meaning it learns effective control strategies directly through interaction with the system’s environment, bypassing the need for a precise pre-defined mathematical model. Simulation results show that the controller demonstrated superior vibration suppression and strong adaptability across several key scenarios.
Graphene materials have recently been shown to produce measurable propulsion when exposed to light, raising the possibility of using them to enhance solar sail performance for satellite deorbiting. The pendulum-based experiments on graphene samples under controlled laser illumination inside a vacuum chamber and a quantitative model that describes the propulsion force as a function of laser power, illuminated area, incident angle, and ambient pressure were carried out. The measured pressure dependence and its shift with sample characteristic size point to Knudsen forces as the dominant mechanism. Orbital dynamics simulations incorporating this model show that a graphene-based sail can deorbit a 100 kg satellite from 660 km altitude roughly 21% faster than a conventional membrane sail of the same area, because the graphene configuration combines atmospheric drag with light-induced propulsion in a hybrid decay process.
To satisfy the real-time beam tracking requirement of low earth orbit (LEO) satellite ground terminals under highly dynamic pass conditions, this paper proposes a three-state hierarchical state-machine beam-control algorithm for liquid crystal phased array antennas (LCPAs). The tracking process is divided into three stages. S1 coarse nine-point acquisition is used to rapidly cover a wide pointing-uncertainty region. S2 fine nine-point refinement introduces quadratic-surface fitting to obtain local peak estimation at sub-step resolution. S3 predictive tracking adopts an interacting multiple model Kalman filter (IMM-KF) based on the constant-acceleration (CA) model and the Singer model, and designs an adaptive covariance regulation mechanism for both measurement and process noise. Combined with explicit delay compensation for liquid-crystal response time, the method suppresses pointing lag and error accumulation in high-dynamic intervals. A dual-threshold hysteretic loss-of-lock criterion and a filter-reset mechanism are also integrated to guarantee autonomous link recovery. Simulation results show that, in an LEO pass scenario with a maximum angular rate of about 2 °/s, the proposed method reduces the median 2D RMSE by about 52%, reduces the 90% quantile error by about 54%, and lowers the median average power loss from 0.14 dB to 0.03 dB compared with the traditional scheme.
Resonant MEMS accelerometers are core inertial devices in precision measurement fields such as inertial navigation, aerospace, and seismic monitoring, characterized by frequency signal output, strong anti-interference capability, and high-precision potential. With the growing demand for sub-microg-level measurement accuracy in high-end industrial and scientific applications, noise suppression and detection sensitivity optimization have become key research topics for resonant accelerometers. This paper conducts a systematic modeling study on resonant accelerometers, analyzes their mechanical structure and acceleration sensing mechanism based on the force-frequency effect of double-ended tuning forks, and establishes corresponding mathematical models. Non-ideal noise models of the mechanical structure and drive loop are constructed separately, and key noise source analysis identifies mechanical thermal noise and 1/f noise of the front-end charge amplifier as the main contributors to system noise. To solve these problems, a dedicated low-noise charge amplifier is designed for the drive loop. Simulation results show that the input-referred noise of the low-noise operational amplifier used in the charge amplifier reaches 18.804 nV/√Hz @ 50 kHz. When applied to the drive loop and verified through tape-out testing, the system achieves a phase noise better than -119.904 dBc/Hz @ 20 Hz offset from the resonant frequency, with a corresponding acceleration noise density of approximately 0.477 μg/√Hz @ 20 Hz.
To address the low computational efficiency problem by numerical calculation and large cumulative error by long-term sequential iterative prediction during the process of predicting the satellite’s transient temperature fields, this paper proposes a Physics-Informed U-Net (PI-Unet) model. Specifically, this PI-Unet model uses multi-branch spatiotemporal features as its inputs and combines hard constraints with a physics-informed loss to ensure the physical consistency of the predicted temperature field. Furthermore, for the error accumulation problem in long-sequence autoregressive prediction models, this paper presents a model training method based on the concept of filtering. Under the guidance of this method, the PI-Unet model can develop a long-term sequence prediction capability while keeping the accuracy of spatial temperature field prediction, achieving high-precision spatiotemporal prediction. By actively injecting prediction errors through a scheduled sampling strategy, along with a multi-step rolling training strategy, the PI-Unet model not only learns the governing physical laws of the spatial distribution of the transient temperature field, but also acquires the filtering capability to mitigate the accumulation of the long-term sequence rolling prediction errors. The experimental results indicate that the PI-Unet model maintains the maximum absolute error of predicting spatial transient temperature field stably below 5.5K and the error of the rolling-predicted transient temperature field in one orbit period less than 6K. In addition, the time for a single-step prediction is reduced to 0.005s, and the time for a total-period prediction is less than 0.5s. Therefore, this research provides a strong and high-efficiency technical support for the real-time monitoring of the satellite’s on-orbit temperature fields.
The rapid evolution of satellite communication systems enables direct network access for terrestrial users via portable devices, but also introduces critical security challenges in access control. In particular, identity hijacking attacks allow malicious users to exploit legitimate access channels, leading to inefficient occupation of scarce satellite resources. Existing approaches mainly depend on trust evaluation or heuristic-based decision strategies, which are inadequate for adapting to dynamic environments. To address this issue, this paper proposes a trust-aware deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for satellite access control, which jointly considers user behavior evaluation and decision optimization. Specifically, a Bayesian trust evaluation model is first developed to quantify the credibility of user behavior by incorporating historical interaction records as prior information. Unlike conventional static trust schemes, an adaptive mechanism is introduced to enhance sensitivity to behavioral dynamics. Building upon the trust assessment, the satellite access process is formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), where system states integrate channel conditions, user trust levels, and service demands. A Deep Q-Network (DQN) is then employed to learn optimal admission and scheduling policies that maximize long-term system utility under resource constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms conventional greedy and threshold-based strategies. In particular, it effectively mitigates the impact of malicious behaviors and improves system utility by over 80%, while achieving more efficient resource utilization in dynamic environments.
Aiming at the constraint issues of adjacent spacecraft solar panel collision avoidance and formation keeping in the pose tracking control of spacecraft formation, this paper proposes a distributed relative position and attitude cooperative control strategy on the basis of high-order control barrier functions. First, nominal control strategies for relative position and attitude tracking using the sliding mode control method to achieve high-precision tracking of relative motion are de-signed. Then, high-order control barrier functions suitable for solar panel collision avoidance and spacecraft formation keeping constraints are constructed. The control strategy constraints satisfying safety specifications are derived based on the forward invariant set theory. Finally, a quadratic programming optimization framework is established by combining the nominal control strategies and constraint conditions and then we obtain the optimal control strategy by solving this framework. Numerical simulations verify that the designed control scheme achieves precise tracking of relative position and attitude for spacecraft formation, avoids collisions between solar panels of adjacent spacecraft and prevents excessive loosening of the formation configuration.
To improve the accuracy and safety margin deficiencies of unmanned aerial vehicles in autonomous medical emergency search-and-rescue missions, this paper develops an adaptive embedded fusion optimizer named CTCM-ALA for rescue UAV path planning. The proposed algorithm hybridizes the tribe-competition member-cooperation strategy and artificial lemming algorithm to construct hierarchically adaptive initial populations, speed up convergence and prevent local convergence traps. Tests on 12 CEC2017 functions prove its better optimization performance. Real-world applications in dense urban and complicated topographic medical rescue cases verify its reliability and precision.
In recent years, the global demand for high-rate, high-reliability, and wide-coverage wireless communications has continued to grow. Traditional satellite communications are faced with bottlenecks such as spectrum scarcity, insufficient single-satellite capacity, and poor adaptability to highly dynamic channels. Relying on the advantages of wide-area coverage and multi-satellite cooperation, low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations can construct distributed satellite MIMO systems and form virtual large-scale antenna arrays, significantly improving system capacity and reliability. However, such systems are characterized by large spatiotemporal scales, and their channels exhibit strong heterogeneity in dimensions such as delay, frequency, and polarization, which are difficult to accurately evaluate using existing methods. To this end, this paper proposes a large-spatiotemporal-scale channel characteristic analysis method for distributed LEO satellite MIMO systems. A satellite-terrestrial full-link channel model is established, and quantitative characterization of multi-dimensional heterogeneity is realized based on statistical boundary analysis. Combined with the H3 global grid system, large-scale simulations are carried out to statistically analyze the distribution laws of delay differences, frequency offsets, and polarization angle deviations under different user configurations. The unique value of this analysis method lies in that its output results can be used to determine the upper limit of buffer capacity required for the receiver to complete coherent combining of multi-channel signals and the frequency offset correction range required for signal acquisition, provide a quantitative basis for optimizing satellite set selection, and offer a solid theoretical model and data support for performance evaluation and parameter design of multi-satellite cooperative systems.
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