Engineers at Ohio State University are using zirconium dioxide otherwise known as fake/synthetic diamonds, to protect jet engines from high temperature corrosion.

The zirconium dioxide coating has proved to comprise of better protective properties than standard ceramic coating that is currently applied to the fan blades of modern aircraft engines.

The ceramic coating provides adequate protection but when it comes to grains of sand, it becomes a different matter.

The ceramic coating expands with the hot engine blades offering continual protection. But grains of sand that may be sucked up into the engine melt in these high temperatures to form glass.

The glass can break down the ceramic coating when hot and when cooled, it forms an inelastic layer on top of the protective coating. The next time the engine gets hot, the new glass layer restricts the ceramic layer from expanding causing the protective coating to crack and break off.

This process greatly reduces the life expectancy of the engine.

Zirconium on the other hand is able to force the glass to bond with the other elements in the protective coating.

This basically turns the glass layer into an additional layer of protective ceramic every time sand melts in the engine.

The picture above shows the ceramic coating which is easily damaged on the left, and the zirconium coating on the left which provides protection from the molten glass.

Unfortunately the zirconium application doesn’t come cheap and is yet to be tested on more complex shapes.

However it does promise a great solution for efficiency not just in aircraft but possibly for automobiles too.

The first cyclone of the 2008 season in the northern Indian Ocean was a devastating one for Burma.

Cyclone Nargis hit the land with sustained winds of 130 mph and gusts of 150-160 mph, equivalent to a strong Category 3 or minimal Category 4 hurricane.

On the 5th news reports stated that several thousand people have been killed, and thousands more were missing. More recent reports estimate that more than 150,000 people are now dead or missing from the cyclone that hit the country’s Irrawaddy delta.

The United Nations estimates that more than 1 million have been left homeless with up to 2.5 million being seriously affected. The World Health Organization has also received reports of large malaria outbreaks in the worst-affected area.

Myanmar’s isolationist regime made recovery efforts extremely complicated, initially delaying the entry of United Nations planes delivering medicine, food, and other supplies into the Southeast Asian nation.

U.S. Military Assistance

The annual military operation and military exercise Cobra Gold 2008, that incidentally was almost canceled this year due to the Thailand military coup, was fortunately underway at the same time as the natural disaster occur. The military was ready, nearby, and able to provide assistance at a moments notice. This fortunate scheduling was not able to take full advantage until the end of the operations that is now extended.

On May 13th, the first U.S. military transport plane was allowed to land, bringing 14 tons of medical supplies, mosquito nets and blankets. Shortly afterwards, another five more US military C-130 transport planes were allowed to bring in more supplies.

The Thailand Public Health Ministry announced May 15th, that they would be able to send 30 doctors, along with medical supplies, to work for two weeks in Burma, totaling 160 aid workers from four Asian countries.

“We are seeing more flights into the country, more supplies getting into the delta,” said Amanda Pitt, a spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “But the levels of aid getting in are not adequate . . . They are not at a level and speed commensurate with what is needed.”

Despite the acceptance of foreign aid, the military regime continues its propaganda. The advocacy group Human Rights Watch reported that the supplies delivered by a US C-130 aircraft Monday were unloaded by men wearing the shirts of the Union Solidarity and Development Association. There are also reports that state-run television continuously ran images of Gen. Than Shwe ceremonially handing out disaster relief.

According to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband,

“A natural disaster is turning into a humanitarian catastrophe of genuinely epic proportions in significant part because of the malign neglect of the regime.”

Among the people trying to get aid into the cyclone zone are Burmese living abroad. Thailand alone has an estimated 1.5 million migrant workers and political dissidents from the country.

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The revolutionary F-117 Night Hawk, the worlds first attack aircraft to employ stealth technology, is scheduled to be retired at the end of this month.

‘The Black Jet’ with its futurist angular design has spent a wholesome 27 years serving as part of the airforce’s arsenal, secretly patrolling hostile skies from Serbia to Iraq. This will all come to an end on April 22nd when the last F-117’s are scheduled to arrive at their final destination, Tonopah Test Range Airfield in Nevada, the site where the jet made its first flight in 1981.

Last month the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which previously managed the F-117 program, had an informal private retirement ceremony with military leaders, base employees and representatives from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The last of the F-117’s will now fly to Palmdale, California, for one more retirement ceremony on April 21st, before making their final flight to Holloman.

Fifty-nine F-117s were made; 10 were retired in December 2006 and 27 since then, the Air Force said. Seven of the planes have crashed, one in Serbia in 1999.The technology which led to the development of the F-117 was designed back in the 1970’s and although it was not invisible to radar, the shape and coating of the F-117’s design greatly reduced its detection.

The single-seat aircraft was designed to fly into heavily defended areas undetected to drop its payloads with surgical precision.

Since the F-117 went operational a total of 558 pilots have flown the jet. Each pilot is then dubbed a ‘bandit’ each with their own bandit number. Feest, ‘Bandit 261′, was the first to lead the stealth fighter on missions into Iraq during Desert Storm in 1991.

He said the fire from surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns was so intense that he stopped looking at it to try to ease his fears,

“We knew stealth worked and it would take a lucky shot to hit us, but we knew a lucky shot could hit us at any time,”

Incredibly, not one stealth was hit during those missions,

The Air Force decided to accelerate the retirement of the F-117s to free up money to modernize the rest of the fleet. The F-117 is being replaced by the F-22 Raptor, which also has stealth technology.

There is no doubt about it, guided ammunitions are changing the way we fight wars. In the days of the Vietnam War, guided ammunitions had already been developed however dumb or iron bombs were still largely in use. These days many munitions have guidance systems ranging from lasers to GPS, some of these systems are even being fitted to unmanned vehicles to enable a totally autonomous attack.

Dumb bombs are what most people imagine when they think of a bomb. There is no way to control the bomb once it has been deployed, they simply fall to the ground and explode, hence the name. Needless to say hitting a target with a dumb bomb is an extremely difficult task and innocent bystanders are often caught up in the carpet bombing technique which is employed.Smart bombs are designed to guide themselves to the target. The concept of this smart weapon is certainly not new. First developed back in 1943 by the Germans, the technology would go through stages of radio-controlled and laser-guided developments before being used on a large scale. The first large-scale use of smart weapons came in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm when they were used by coalition forces against Iraq.

More Information On The Air Force’s Newest Smart bomb Plus Two Videos After The Jump.

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The Pain Ray or Active Denial System (ADS) is a long standing joint project between the Air Force and the Pentagons Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate. The ABS non-lethal weapon consists of a real life ray gun which shoots 95 GHz millimeter waves that penetrate the skin at a 64th of an inch beneath the skin. This causes the water molecules to boil where the nerve receptors are most concentrated and of course, this hurts like hell.

A press release by Sandia National Laboratories explains that when the waves hit,

“[They produce an] intense heating sensation [which] stops only if the individual moves out of the beam’s path or the beam is turned off……..
“The sensation caused by the system has been described by test subjects as feeling like touching a hot frying pan.”

Another Demonstration Video And More Info After The Jump >>>

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THE END IS NEAR!

Of the month that is. Love it or hate it - we all respect it. Nuclear energy offers a memorizing display of force as seen in the video above. The most powerful and destructive force that man has ever been able to achieve so far. With countries and terrorist threatening to use this power for evil, where does this leave the nuclear future?

South Africa may offer insight and a staging point for the future revolution of nuclear energy. The continents only nuclear power plant is located on its southern tip in no man’s land of Cape Town. It is an obsolete, water cooled reactor that is run by the State. However Eskom is ready to change all that and become the world’s first pebble bed reactor.

Pebble bed reactor promises safer, cleaner, smaller and more affordable power than conventional nuclear power plants. They even say this style reactor is “meltdown-proof” and “walk-away safe.”

“It is physically impossible for it to suffer the kind of accident at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl,” Ferreira says.

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A team of Hungarian engineers have created jet powered fire extinguisher. The team of crazy engineers removed the gun turrets from an old Russian tank, replaced them with 2 turbines from a MIG-21 fighter jet and injected the whole thing with gallons of water. The result is the ultimate jet powered fire extinguisher. Whilst this may not be practical for most residential fires (imagine not only putting out the fire but blasting your whole home to smithereens) it will certainly help with large oil blazes that typically last for days. The concept is somewhat old and used in Australia mines and even back in Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. However, this is a more powerful and effective system. It was originally known as the “The Great Wind” for obvious reasons.

Sent to my Email that has by now I am sure cycle the globe of Email inboxes of many military members already, but if not I wanted to include them here.

During the WW I years, Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas made some incredible human pictures
by using thousands of sailors or soldiers in uniform to create the following images.

Click the photo to view the images:

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Spc. Channing Moss is lucky to be alive, after a fierce ambush and bloody firefight his buddies, a helicopter crew and a medical team would risk their own lives to save his.

On March the 16th, 2007 Alpha Company platoon had set out from Forward Operating Base Tillman around 8 a.m. for a meeting with tribal leaders in the village of Srah Kandah in Paktika province near the Pakistan border. Moss, then a private first class, was manning a Mark 19 machine gun in the turret of his up-armored Humvee when his unit, 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division was attacked by Afghan Forces.

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The AC-130 gunship is a heavily-armed ground attack airplane. The basic airframe is manufactured by Lockheed, and Boeing is responsible for the conversion into a gunship and for aircraft support. It is a variant of the C-130 Hercules transport plane. The AC-130 Gunship II superseded the AC-47 Gunship I in Vietnam.

Well, the Spectre crew members have never been this HOT!

Mufasta Ali and Bin Ladin Better Watch Their Tails!

Vanessa Dobos is a gunner on a USAF AC-130 Gunship. She has seen action in Iraq and Afghanistan. She likes long walks on the beach, men who are not afraid to cry and puppies.

Her dislikes include feed tray stoppages, tracer flareout of her NVGs and premature fixed-wing strikes scattering her high-value targets.

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Making the rounds to an Email box near you! I just got it and found out that this has been circulating for some time. Below are photographs of a prototype aircraft known as the Talon. Reportedly it was taken onboard the USS George Washington CVN-73 for catapult fit checks. It noted that it was not exactly still Top Secret but certainly not yet made public.

The specs that were known were list to be a Mach 3.5 (top speed in the Mach 4 range), super-cruise stealth fighter / bomber / interceptor with approximately a 4,000nm range.

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Since the Cold War the U.S Missile Command and the U.S Air Force have continually focused their efforts on designing an Airborne Laser Weapon. Whilst this idea may still seem like science fiction, testing for this ground breaking technology has already begun.

A powerful Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) has been mounted in a turret-like array on the nose of specially modified Boeing 747-400 air freighters. The Airborne System’s (ABL) primary mission will be to locate and shoot down enemy ballistic missiles whilst still in the launch stage.

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Range, speed and flexibility. Hard rules once defined by the limitations of previous medium-lift helicopters. The V-22 is the world’s first production tilt-rotor combines the vertical performance of a helicopter with the high speed and range of a fixed wing aircraft which offers twice the speed, three times the payload, five times the range, and can fly more than twice as high as older rotor craft it is destined to replace. The Osprey is about to revolutionize military air transport in a way that has not been seen since the introduction of helicopters more than 50 years ago.

The Osprey is a tilt rotor vertical/short take off and landing (VSTOL) multi-mission aircraft with capabilities like no other. Combining the vertical flight capabilities of a helicopter with the speed and range of a turbo prop airplane it permits air to aerial refueling and worldwide self deployment.

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Boeing have been hot press this year following the highly anticipated 787 Dreamliner, despite the huge launch campaign and all the time spent perfecting the Dreamliner, Boeing have still found time to develop and begin testing the new X-48B an unmanned Blended Wing Body Aircraft or BWB.

The first ever flight took off on the 20th July from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. This X-48B is only the second prototype that Boeing has built and the only one tested in flight; it was created to test the “structural, aerodynamic and operational efficiencies of the BWB concept,” according to Bob Liebeck, the BWB program manager, especially during take off and landing.

BWB planes don’t have a tail, the wing itself blends into the fuselage, giving more lift and less drag than a traditional circular fuselage. This means 30% less fuel consumption than a normal plane and also less noise, both inside and on the ground.

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