Meeting the challenges of modern interceptor guidance by non-conventional approaches
The challenge of intercepting threats with non conventional warheads, the major drive for the development of ballistic missile defense systems since the first Gulf War of 1991, became even more serious when the reentry vehicles were assumed to be capable of maneuvering. Successful interception of such targets, requiring very small miss distances, cannot be guaranteed by the classical guidance and estimation methods that have been used against manned aircraft. Future interceptor guidance strategy has to be based on pursuit-evasion game concepts and the estimator design has to be integrated with the guidance law. Following such non conventional approaches has the potential to achieve the requirement of hit-to-kill accuracy against randomly maneuvering threats.
A novel missile warhead tracking algorithm based on geometric data association
This paper proposes a new ballistic missile warhead tracking method for enhancing the anti-ballistic capability of a FMCW seeker used for ballistic missile defense (BMD) system. Under the assumption that the target has a single dominant scatterer, most FMCW radars adopt the well-known paring algorithm to obtain range and range rate information. However, the ballistic missile is generally composed of many scatterers and the warhead section of concern is not a dominant one. Therefore, the conventional paring algorithm may not be applicable for the ballistic missile warhead tracking. To overcome this limitation, the problem is reformulated as tracking of multiple scatterers of a ballistic missile in view of data association. Furthermore, an inventive hypotheses validation scheme is newly devised by exploiting the geometric constraint among scatterers corresponding to the ballistic missile warhead and its center of body. Therefore, the proposed geometric data association filter can drastically improve the warhead tracking performance in practice. Through computer simulations, the effectiveness and the reliability of the proposed method are demonstrated.
Ground Fault Protection for Electric Utility Generating Station Medium Voltage Auxiliary Power Systems
Most generating station designs have medium voltage auxiliary power systems with low resistance grounded neutrals.1 In order to provide even higher reliability, the auxiliary power distribution system configurations supply increasingly redundant process equipment.