Hardware qualification for scientific ballooning missions

The European Stratospheric Balloon Observatory (ESBO) initiative aims at simplifying the access to stratospheric balloon missions. We plan to provide platforms and support with instrument design in order to support scientists. During the design process, the inevitable question of qualification for the harsh flight conditions arises. Unfortunately, there is no existing standard for qualification of stratospheric ballooning hardware. Thus, we developed a qualification procedure for use within ESBO and similar projects.In this paper, we present our analysis of the environmental conditions in the stratosphere. While conditions at typical balloon float altitudes are similar to the space environment, there are also some relevant differences. For example, the thermal environment is dominated by radiation and thermal conduction, but the remaining atmosphere still supports a certain amount of convection. The remaining atmospheric pressure in the stratosphere also leads to reduced arcing distances. Vibrational loads are far less than for space missions, but quasi-static or shock loads may occur. The criticality of radiation increases with mission duration.Based on the environmental conditions, we present the qualification procedures for ESBO, which are based on the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) standards for space systems. Overtesting against too high requirements leads to overengineering, driving mission cost and mitigating the advantages of balloons over space missions. Therefore, we modified the ECSS standards to fit typical scientific ballooning missions over several days at altitudes up to 40 km. Furthermore, we analyzed design rules for space systems with regard to their relevance for scientific ballooning, including material and component selection. We present the experience from the hardware qualification process for the ESBO prototype STUDIO (Stratospheric UV Demonstrator of an Imaging Observatory). Even though boundary conditions are different for each individual mission, we aimed for a broader approach: We investigated more general requirements for scientific ballooning missions to support future flights.     

Effect of adding Nb foil on joint properties of laser fusion welding for TC4 titanium and 7075 aluminum alloy

It is difficult to gain effective Ti-Al fusion welding joints due to their differences in thermal properties and the appearance of brittle Ti-Al Intermetallic Compounds (IMCs). The experiments of laser fusion welding for TC4 titanium and 7075 aluminum alloy were carried out, temperature field and ductility/brittleness, as well as chemical potential of elements, were calculated, and the effect of adding Nb foil on mechanical properties of the weld was also investigated. The results suggested that Nb atoms tend to diffuse toward Al side, which is conducive to the participation of Nb in the metallurgical reaction and contributes to forming the Ti-Nb-Al IMC layer at the interface. As the thickness of Nb foil increases, the tensile-shear force of joint climbs first but then declines, and reaches the highest value of 1663 N with 0.10 mm-thickness Nb foil, representing 58.38% enhancement compared with the non-added one. Adding Nb foil slows down the heat transfer as a blocker, and thus both the melting amount of Al and the mixing area of Ti and Al decrease. In addition, Nb alloying reduces the brittleness of the Ti-Al compound. Hence, the joint properties of titanium/aluminum are improved with the addition of Nb foil.     

推进剂管理装置的可靠性增长及试验验证

采用原始的焊接方式焊接筛网式推进剂管理装置的收集器合格率低、可靠性差。为此,采用纯钛箔作为过渡层进行了不锈钢筛网与钛合金支压板的电阻缝焊试验以及随后这两者与钛合金骨架的电子束焊试验,然后进行了地面力学环境下的振动试验,以验证焊接方式改进后收集器的可靠性。焊接试验结果表明,纯钛箔过渡层一方面可以大幅降低筛网在电阻缝焊时的焊接热量,有效地减小筛网的热变形;另一方面可以在电阻缝焊后形成牢固、封闭的纯钛/不锈钢筛网焊缝过渡区,有效地增加电子束焊时筛网的变形抗力,从而使得焊接后试样的合格率和性能大幅提高。振动试验结果表明,焊接方式改进后收集器的可靠度置信下限从0.90增加到了0.96。     

TC4钛合金切削中切屑塑性变形分析

对TC4钛合金切削过程中锯齿形切屑形成过程和切削力的关系进行了实验研究,并对锯齿形切屑形成中微观塑性变形区进行了分析。结果表明:当切削速度大于48.75 m/min时,切屑由带状转变为锯齿形。锯齿形切屑的形成导致了切削过程中切削力的波动变化,切削力与切屑的锯齿形变化规律一致,锯齿形切屑形成中塑性变形区的宽度随切削速度的增加而减小。     

Exploring 2D projection and 3D spatial information for aircraft 6D pose

The 6D pose estimation is important for the safe take-off and landing of the aircraft using a single RGB image. Due to the large scene and large depth, the exiting pose estimation methods have unstratified performance on the accuracy. To achieve precise 6D pose estimation of the aircraft, an end-to-end method using an RGB image is proposed. In the proposed method, the 2D and 3D information of the keypoints of the aircraft is used as the intermediate supervision, and 6D pose information of the aircraft in this intermediate information will be explored. Specifically, an off-the-shelf object detector is utilized to detect the Region of the Interest (RoI) of the aircraft to eliminate background distractions. The 2D projection and 3D spatial information of the pre-designed keypoints of the aircraft is predicted by the keypoint coordinate estimator (KpNet). The proposed method is trained in an end-to-end fashion. In addition, to deal with the lack of the related datasets, this paper builds the Aircraft 6D Pose dataset to train and test, which captures the take-off and landing process of three types of aircraft from 11 views. Compared with the latest Wide-Depth-Range method on this dataset, our proposed method improves the average 3D distance of model points metric (ADD) and 5° and 5 m metric by 86.8% and 30.1%, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed method gets 9.30 ms, 61.0% faster than YOLO6D with 23.86 ms.