Additively Manufactured Functionally Graded Radomes for Hypersonic Vehicles

Hypersonic vehicles at a speed of Mach 5 above can experience very high temperatures at 1500~2000˚C at their leading edges depending on their distance from the earth and their Mach numbers. Communications between hypersonic vehicles and the ground station have been very difficult due to the plasms sheath produced at the leading edges of hypersonic vehicles. These hypersonic vehicles need Radomes that can go up to very high temperatures and also maintain great electromagnetic transparency across a broad frequency band simultaneously. Commercially available Radomes are mostly for near room-temperature applications and cannot meet the need for hypersonic vehicles. Radome technologies have grown rapidly in different applications from commercial purposes to military operations such as surveillance radar systems, hypersonic missiles, and spacecraft, which put a high demand on Radome materials development and innovation, especially for hypersonic vehicles. The demand for hypersonic Radomes with improved performance on their low dielectric constant, low loss tangent, high melting temperature, high flexural strength, high Young’s modulus, high thermal conductivity, low water absorption, low density, high particle, rain and thermal impact resistance, and high mechanical strength, hardness, and flexibility has been continuously growing. The combined requirements on their electrical, thermal, mechanical requirements make it very challenging to deliver hypersonic Radomes. Based on our decades long experience on electromagnetic materials, devices and systems, Winchester Technologies, LLC proposes to develop and demonstrate a new solution using additive manufacturing technologies for functionally graded Radome based on Si3N4 and BeO that have combined performance requirements needed for hypersonic Radomes. Additive manufacturing also allows fabless designing 3-D complex structures like functionally graded Radomes by using commercially available electromagnetic design software. It is notable that hypersonic Radomes are also very large ceramic parts with dimensions in the range of several feet, which cannot be made in most companies or research labs which can typically make ~1 inch or smaller ceramic parts. It is critical to be able to access the best additive manufacturing facilities for additive manufacturing of such feet-scale large ceramic hypersonic Radomes. The 3D designs can be sent to the best ceramics additive manufacturing facilities for additive manufacturing with fast turn-around time, and, hence lowering the costs.