Future US Combat Drone Completes Ground Engine Test
Blue Force Technologies and the Air Force Research Laboratory have successfully completed a ground test for a novel carbon fiber composite propulsion flowpath system for BFT's Fury uncrewed fighter under the AFRL Bandit program.
As announced in Mar 2022 BFT, an agile aerospace and defense company based in North Carolina, is maturing a high-performance uncrewed 5th generation fighter design that provides replication of pacing threats at a fraction of the cost of a crewed fighter. The air vehicle technology developed under Bandit supports uncrewed adversary air training objectives relevant to the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps and can be adapted for other Autonomous Collaborative Platform (ACP) mission areas. The Bandit program further demonstrates the impact that small businesses can have in the defense industrial base.
AFRL, in collaboration with BFT, is exploring the value of digital engineering to expedite ground and flight test by harnessing the artifacts generated through digital analysis as proof of capability. This ground test provided high-fidelity data that will be used in validation of computational methods over the coming months.
Fury
said Scott Bledsoe, President of Blue Force Technologies.
Leading into testing, the BFT and AFRL team performed time-accurate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis which leveraged the extensive computational resources of AFRL and Army Engineer Research and Development Center. The purpose of the test was to validate the analysis to gain confidence by the team in using the CFD tool in other portions of the flight envelope. "With AFRL's help, we are further building out our digital engineering toolchain to enable future ACP variants to be designed quickly," said Bledsoe.
BanditJune 2022
said Alyson Turri, AFRL Bandit Program Manager.
Top Photo: Fury conducting a ground engine test
Source: Press Release
