Simulation Test of The Aerodynamic Environment of A Missile-Borne Pulsed Laser Forward Detection System at High Flight Speed

Abstract

When a missile-borne pulsed laser forward detection system flies at supersonic speed, the laser beam will be distorted by the uneven outflow field, resulting in a significant reduction in ranging accuracy. In this paper, the impact of high flight speed on a pulsed laser detection system is studied. First, a new ray tracing method with adaptive step size adjustment is proposed, which greatly improves the computational efficiency. Second, the aerodynamic environment of a munition flying at high speed is simulated by an intermittent transonic and supersonic wind tunnel to obtain the schlieren data of the flow field at various Mach numbers. The schlieren data present a shock wave structure similar to that of the simulation. In addition, the variation patterns of the pulsed laser echo waveform of the model under different aerodynamic conditions are studied to evaluate the detectability and operational stability of the laser detection system under static conditions. The test results match the simulation results well, and the two offer relatively consistent shock wave structures, which verifies the correctness and effectiveness of the flow field simulation model. The test echo waveforms are in good agreement with the simulated echo waveforms; the relative errors between the peak values of test and simulated echo waveforms at various Mach numbers do not exceed 20%, and the correlation coefficients between the test and simulated echo waveforms all exceed 0.7, indicating high correlations between the two.