Aeronautical Sciences and Flight Control Technology for Military Aerospace Vehicles

Use of photonic communications technology on military aerospace vehicles offers significant advantages in weight, volume, reduced cost and improved reliability for these vehicles. Weight and volume savings come from replacement of copper wire andelectronic termination hardware in cable assemblies having large wire counts with optical fiber cables having small fiber counts. Cost savings are associated with the weight and volume savings and with integration of control, power and communicationsystems. Reliability is enhanced through Electromagnetic Interference susceptibility reduction, multipath redundant communication lines and communication system simplifications which are part of an integrated vehicle management system design. Specifictechnology which will be required in a fully optimized photonic aerospace vehicle communication system and which is not currently available for the aerospace environment includes 1) multimode optical fiber Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) tap forwavelength selective drop and insert of optical signals along a multimode optical fiber bus, 2) wavelength selected Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) and 3) optimized actuator motor phase sensor interface to a photonic network. Optelecomproposes to develop multimode optical fiber WDM tap hardware and to investigate application of existing communications technology to the aerospace environment for wavelength selected VCSELs and actuator motor phase sensor interface.