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gelgoog

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This is a modernized version of the engine used in the Energia and Zenit rockets. It has a single combustion chamber with four nozzles. So the picture below shows a single engine.

NPO Energomash sent RD-171MV engine for Soyuz-5 rocket first stage assembly​

October 29, 2021

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© Roscosmos

Specialists from NPO Energomash (Khimki, part of Roscosmos) sent the RD-171MV rocket engine to the Progress Rocket and Space Center (Samara, part of Roscosmos) in accordance with contractual obligations. The engine was received on October 25, 2021, for assembly as part of the Soyuz-5 advanced rocket first stage.
‘This engine has already passed fire tests at the NPO Energomash research and testing complex, which confirmed the quality of design and technological solutions of our engineers. Now it will undergo another series of tests as part of the launch vehicle first stage. By producing this technologically complex engine, the company has once again confirmed the high professional level of the specialists in the production and testing departments’, commented Igor Arbuzov, NPO Energomash Director General.
The RD-171MV is the world's most powerful liquid-propellant rocket engine developed, produced and tested at NPO Energomash. The engine uses kerosene and oxygen as fuel components.
The promising two-stage medium-class Soyuz-5 launch vehicle is being developed to provide launches of unmanned spacecraft to solar-synchronous, highly elliptical, geo-transitional and geostationary orbits, including those using an upper stage, as well as launches of crewed transport vehicles.
 
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pmc

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its long article about Lithography development , scientific knowledge and Russian contribution to it.
They sold two machines to Korea and assembling more.
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Lithographer​

All these high-tech processes are carried out in a machine called a EUV lithographer. This installation is the size of a small house and costs from € 120 million apiece. Such machines are produced by the only company in the world - the Dutch ASML. “There is a lot of Russian scientific work in this lithographer,” emphasizes Yevgeny Gorsky. “There is a hall in ASML where patents hang in frames. There are several hundred of them, and a significant part of the EUF patents are issued for people with Russian surnames. At the Institute of Spectroscopy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ISAN), a world-renowned scientific school for the study of physical processes in lithography was created. In the early 2010s, on the basis of this school, with the assistance of Skolkovo and Rusnano, the EUF Labs company was established. the purpose of which was the development of new principles for the creation of high-tech equipment for the EUV lithographic process. In the same place, at ISAN, a very strong school was created for the mathematical modeling of the processes occurring in EUV plasma. Colleagues have now created their own company, and they are ordered by the five leaders of the world electronics industry to simulate the processes of interaction of plasma with elements of the source structure.
“Before us, there was practically no positive experience in this area in Russia in creating commercial equipment,” concludes the general director of the TIC. “All technologies were developed and sold as IP (intellectual property), and for the first time we tried to create a ready-to-use device. And we did it: this year we have already delivered two cars to Korea and are assembling several more. In our country, there is a gap between science and a product that can be mass-produced. We managed to overcome it, and this is important: Russia should not remain on the margins of the global innovation process. "

There is new modules of AESA in space systems on the basis of the advanced highly reliable technology LTCC (Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic) - low-temperature co-fired ceramics.
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RKS has developed new AFAR modules for orbital high-speed radio links​

 

Tirdent

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This is a modernized version of the engine used in the Energia and Zenit rockets. It has a single combustion chamber with four nozzles. So the picture below shows a single engine.

More than 90% of the thrust of a 9-engine Falcon 9 FT first stage in a single engine. What's more impressive (slightly insane, actually) is that it is a single-shaft turbopump design, which is to say the LOx and RP-1 pump rotors are both powered by a common turbine. This deceptively simple system has to move an immense mass of propellant, and deliver it against what is still one of the highest combustion chamber pressures outside the (much smaller, 2-shaft) Space-X Raptor.

At full thrust, cramming 2.5 tons worth of LOx & RP-1 *per second* into the 250bar combustion chamber, the pump develops a staggering 190MW. That famously is the shaft power equivalent of three 25000t Arktika-class nuclear icebreakers (half the fleet, in other words) sailing full steam ahead, from a rotor assembly about the size of a human being! You have to *really* know what you're doing to pull that off, and to crown it all they were still able to provide a very wide throttle range, with stable operation down to 40%.

As impressive as Raptor is, it doesn't quite match this achievement, first realized almost 40 years ago with little computer support, IMHO. I once spoke to a former engineer at Kuznetsov DB, the bureau that developed the NK-33, which pioneered the oxidizer-rich staged-combustion technology underlying the RD-171. He had spent a year calculating the deformation under load of a turbopump (might've been the NK-33, I don't recall) using slide rules and analytical methods!
 
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gelgoog

Lieutenant General
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The Checkmate showed at MAKS was more than just a mockup. It was manufactured to be used for ground integration tests. So it is supposed to be an accurate representation of the thing so they can check out if all the pieces fit together and do evaluation on ergonomics and things like that. The Checkmate used extensive computer modeling and simulation to retire risk on the prototypes. The airframe present at MAKS is not for a flyable prototype though.

I doubt they will be moving it to Dubai since it is necessary for ground tests but who knows.

The aircraft will use a novel tail control mechanism. The whole flight control surfaces and airframe design is quite different from the Su-57 so they likely will need to either substantially change the flight control software or redo it from scratch. That is probably their main issue. Most of the other components and systems will be borrowed from the Su-57.
 
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anzha

Captain
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The Checkmate showed at MAKS was more than just a mockup. It was manufactured to be used for ground integration tests. So it is supposed to be an accurate representation of the thing so they can check out if all the pieces fit together and do evaluation on ergonomics and things like that.

Do you have a cite for the MAKS airframe being something real? Everything I have read was it was a pure mock-up. Not a plywood one, to be sure, but the avionics, displays and everywhere were just for show.
 

Tirdent

Junior Member
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Was anybody in their right mind expecting this to be anything other than the same airframe/mock-up we saw at MAKS? That was only 3 months ago!

Easy to just unveil the finished article when you're awash in money because the domestic customer has already given you all the business you'll ever need. I'm sure Sukhoi would much prefer that modus operandi as well, but I think it's obvious why they went a different route.

Do you have a cite for the MAKS airframe being something real? Everything I have read was it was a pure mock-up. Not a plywood one, to be sure, but the avionics, displays and everywhere were just for show.

Define "something real". Not all mock-ups are created equal, some are purely cosmetic (i.e. for show) others are engineering test beds, which might qualify as "something real", depending on your interpretation.

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gelgoog

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On digital technologies for managing the life cycle of a gas turbine engine​

04.11.2021

The widespread use of digital twins allows the enterprises of the United Engine Corporation to reduce investment in production by 40% and significantly accelerate the development of new products.

To compete in the marketplace, it is necessary to demonstrate an advantage in development speed and product quality. Today, one of the key indicators for the UEC is the speed of launching new products on the market.

Previously, any gas turbine engine traveled from paper to production in 15-18 years. The new PD-14 engine was developed and put into mass production in 10 years, and with the PD-8 engine, UEC-Aviadvigatel and UEC-Perm Motors plan to keep within 5 years. This is basically impossible without digitalization of product lifecycle management.

How was the engine designed before? By order of the central design bureau, other design bureaus developed individual engine components on paper: compressors, turbines, rotation parts. The results were sent by mail to the central design bureau for approval. Such a process may not be effective.

Today, all UEC design bureaus operate in a single virtual master model of the product being designed. The model itself coordinates the elements with each other and shows in real time how, for example, fuel automation affects the combustion chamber, which is being designed by another team at the same time. This technology allows you to take into account a large number of interrelated factors. The designer is able to keep in mind two, three, four parameters interconnected. And when there are thousands of them, you can only follow them in numbers.

Another area where digital twins cannot be dispensed with today is engine testing. Reliability is the most important characteristic that the power plant together with the airframe must provide, especially in civil aviation. To confirm this reliability, full-scale tests are carried out.

Previously, a pilot had to fly an aircraft for three years in different modes, including overload mode, in order to study what critical parameters lead to this or that destruction. Now a significant part of the tests has been transferred to the virtual space. Digitalization makes it possible to reduce, reduce the cost and simplify this process: thanks to calculation models, you can avoid wasting enormous human resources and not producing unnecessary expensive samples, avoiding the consumption of aviation fuel and reducing the amount of emissions into the atmosphere.

But some of the tests are still being carried out on "live" engines. Among the technologies involved, one can single out digital control of parameters on test benches. This is not quite artificial intelligence yet, but the program makes some decisions on its own. If a situation arises that can lead to the destruction of the engine, damage to the test bench and a threat to the lives of the testers, the program automatically stops the installation.

Predictive analytics can work not only in testing but also in production. The technology allows collecting information from sensors on machine tools, comparing it with retrospective data of the same sensors and generating a forecast. For example, this is how you can predict the failure of equipment.

The self-learning system generates a trend and signals to the mechanics that, for example, with a 90% probability, after 25 hours of operation, such and such a bearing will fail. This will lead to an accident on the machine, the guide will go away, and you will have to carry out major repairs. The system allows you to prevent such a situation, stop the machine, replace the unit and do with less losses.

When about 15 years ago, the UEC only began to introduce digital technologies, no one had yet talked about digitalization and artificial intelligence, it was about automation. Now digitalization in engine building is a seamless management of the entire life cycle of a product from idea to mass production and service maintenance, right up to its disposal when the engine has exhausted itself. Virtually every leading enterprise in the industry is already approaching the full realization of such a cycle.

At the same time, digitalization remains a tool that does not work without a person's creativity. Decisions are still made by the engineer: how to interpret the data received from the machine, what conclusions to draw. This is something that has not yet been digitized with decent quality. Systems can prompt a person, give him an idea of improvement, but they themselves cannot yet offer such improvements. Whereas previously the slide rule and calculator were the tools of an engineer, now it is a computer and a digital twin.

Any major investment decision is made only after a simulation model of the future production or workshop has been formed in the virtual space. It may turn out, for example, that the machines are not optimally positioned. And if you arrange them differently, then one of them will complement the other, and the required throughput will be provided not with three, but with two machines. When the whole picture is formed in digital format, the project begins: a new workshop is built, equipment is purchased and placed in the same way as it was tested on a model. By eliminating the human factor from the design process of future production, you can save up to 40% of your investment.

Based on the materials of the magazine "Wings of the Motherland" 9/10/2021, pp. 103-105
 
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