- Please join me in welcoming Mr. Allen Yan,
systems engineer at Valley Tech Systems, Inc.
The topic of demonstration is Valley Tech Systems'
active nozzle propulsion system technology.
The company will have 20 minutes
to demonstrate their technology,
followed by a 10 minute Q and A session.
And when you're ready, we will start the clock.
- [Allen] Okay.
Thank you.
As mentioned, my name is Allen Yan,
systems engineer at Valley Tech Systems.
I'm joined here today by Russ Carlson,
Vice President of the Aerospace Division,
who is in the audience today.
And today, I will be presenting information
about our active nozzle propulsion technology
in support of the xTechSearch 2.0.
Quick outline of today's summary.
Start off with just a quick program summary.
Go into the significance of the innovation
and benefits of the technology.
Go into a little information about our prototype design
that we put together for this demonstration.
Show results from our hot-fire test.
And then go into information about
our path forward and commercialization plans.
So one big thing to note about these charts
is that they're labeled non-proprietary,
and unclassified, so that means we had
to scrub them pretty heavily for this presentation.
The technology is borne from the Missile Defense Agency.
And Valley Tech Systems has been working with them
for the past 12 years or so.
And we've made some pretty big breakthroughs
in the past few years.
So this technology's very unique to the United States,
and I think everyone can understand
that we wanna keep it that way as well.
So starting off with program summary.
Just very generically,
what are the benefits of the technology?
In this presentation I'll show that
this is applicable to two modernization topics.
The first being long range precision fires.
And the second being air and missile defense.
What we're bringing to the table
is controllable solid propellant propulsion,
and the key word here is controllable.
So that's a very loaded term.
I could go and discuss that for hours,
and I'll slowly define that in this presentation.
Ultimately what that does though,
it allows for very flexible mission engagements.
And in some of the applications
we're seeing that we can increase range
by over 67 percent, and increase maneuverability
by over 70 percent, so those are fairly big numbers.
And consideration of cost acquisition and
transition time, were looking for a relatively
simple screw in upgrade for existing systems,
so we have something that your deployed already,
we want to pop the nozzle off,
put our system in,
and boom, your pretty much ready to go.
Were enabling that through lots of
mature technologies,
so over the years we've matured our component
technology to TRL-4, at a minimum.
Were also bringing a lot of state of the art
control algorithms and software technology,
as well as a small PAN portfolio,
that leverages again lots of SBI data rights
and 12 years od DOD investment.
Having said that, as a result of this demonstration,
we actually have realized
that cost is a huge issue for the army.
And so we came up with a very clever way
to kind of get around the precision requirements
that is typically needed for controllable solid propulsion.
So that may be a new patent
that were going to look at after this,
or we may just keep it proprietary
depending on how things go.
Some of the major milestones,
I would like to think that we got a lot done in 6 months.
So first thing we did, was after we won,
we got on the phone with our commercialization partner,
had a technical interchange meeting,
spoke with them, and had a kickoff meeting,
to kind of strategize what we were going to do,
and how we want to approach this.
Had a system requirements review
using input from our partner,
went into concept design, detail design,
performed hot fire tests,
and all that will be covered in today's
AUSA conference presentation.
Major accomplishments, so big thing is again,
we were able to successfully demonstrate
a single axis hot thrust, or hot fire test.
This test mitigated a lot of the major risks
that we were carrying into this at the beginning.
And we're confidently able to advertise
that we got the prototype up to T-R-L 4.
So there's a difference between component and systems,
so we got the system all the way up to TRL-4.
That's a lot harder.
And then, as a part of the judging process last time,
one of the judges was so interested,
he actually got us in touch with the CDCC
in Picatinny, New Jersey.
And we actually started talking with them,
and we came up with a spinoff application,
that pretty much uses the same technology
applied to an artillery application.
On top of that,
we've been talking a lot to our commercialization partners,
both within the prime contractors
and the government offices.
And I'll go over that as well.
So starting off, the significance of the innovation.
Problem statement.
This is, first three columns, are just public sources.
These are various news articles and government reports
regarding how our foreign adversaries
have started upgrading all their weapon systems.
And in a nutshell, they can outreach us.
Very simply put, they can shoot us,
and we cannot shoot them back.
That's the basic issue.
So, for what it's worth, in 20,
well actually, many years prior,
U.S. Department of Defense started looking
at modernizing pretty much all branches of the military.
So, in the army specifically,
looks like they were prioritizing
long range precision fires as a first one.
That being defined as, capabilities including munitions
that restore army dominance in range,
lethality, and target acquisition.
So Valley Tech Systems technology,
we address all three bullet points of that.
And then, on top of that, air and missile defense.
So what is Valley Tech Systems technology?
This is a little tricky chart here.
But when we first pitched this idea,
we were initially looking at a 2.75 inch rocket loader.
So this is actually something
that's deployed by the military already.
This is called the Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System.
What they have in green here is a warhead,
gray is a smart guidance and control system,
and then this white and gold section is,
for lack of a better term, a dumb rocket loader.
You light it, it goes, and it does it's thing.
So, what Valley Tech Systems wanted to do was
take that dumb nozzle, and replace it with a smart nozzle.
So, you essentially get a smart rocket loader
from end to end.
And, this is just a teaser of our prototype
that we came up with.
And, hard to show, but it is a screw in capability.
So, you can theoretically take off the dumb nozzle,
put in the smart nozzle, and there you have it.
So, conceptually, what can we do with this?
This is a sample application
shown for an air to surface engagement.
And some of the things, the letters here
correspond to this diagram here.
And what we're trying to do, in this engagement,
is say a non line of sight engagement.
So, say you have to shoot over a building,
or around a building, or over a mountain or something,
but you can't see the target, and they're very far away,
and you still want to hit them.
So, first thing you may have to do,
after you shoot it out of the,
in this case a helicopter,
is that you have to do a high-D turn,
kind of really quickly go up,
give yourself a quick boost,
to make sure you have enough energy
to go over your obstacle.
And then steps D is the low level sustain.
This is where our technology enables the long range.
But the analogy that I like to use is,
if you're driving in your car on the highway,
you can either drive at like a steady 60 miles per hour,
and just kind of cruise to your destination.
Your gas mileage is probably gonna
be pretty good the whole way.
Or the other way, is you can just floor it,
and drive like 120 miles an hour,
but your gonna run out of gas really quickly.
So ours, we optimize for the lower speed.
We can optimize to our flight and drag profile.
And that's how we get a lot of increased range.
As you near your target,
that's when you want to start like steering.
You can kind of open up your eyes,
start looking at the target, point at them precisely.
And then at the very end,
what you can do to increase lethality,
is to give yourself a really kick boost,
or give yourself another boost at the end.
So the analogy there would be,
say like getting hit by a baseball,
thrown by a little league pitcher.
It might sting if you get hit by one of them.
But, where a professional player,
if he were to throw a ball at you at a 100 miles per hour,
that's gonna hurt a lot more.
So that's why why you want that terminal boost,
to really give yourself additional kinetic energy
at the very end there.
Next slide, this is a similar graphic,
that we put together for Picatinny, New Jersey.
So they had an artillery application.
And this again is pretty much the same thing,
that our technology is scalable to artillery.
And overall, we can enhance range,
target acquisition, and lethality.
Next slide is an application for air and missile defense.
In this one, we've been talking to Red Stone Arsenal,
where they are looking to upgrade
there lower tier missile defense.
So another deployed army system,
and we're looking to just upgrade it
by applying our technology.
What they wanna do, this ones markedly different,
but it still leverages a lot of our technology.
First thing they wanna do is a very large turnover event,
normally issuing a little stream upward,
you mean turn yourself, so your close to the target.
And then this idle part is actually the hard part.
So, there's not a lot of companies,
that can do this efficiently,
but our technology is very good for that.
So idle, this is again another aspect
of the controllable part.
And this is kind of where we excel.
And then at the very end,
once you're very close to your target,
he may be off by just a little bit.
And so you have to turn it back on,
and then make very sudden maneuvers
to correct yourself at endgame.
Compared to traditional fin controlled systems,
fin controlling can only get you so much,
because you're limited by aerodynamic forces,
whereas with our system, you have thrust vector control,
so you can get a lot more,
so the kill box is a lot bigger with our system as well.
So overall, increased range, and increased lethality
and target acquisition.
So quantitatively,
how much will this help long range precision fires?
The chart in the top left
is just to kind of show you that we actually do the work.
We ran trajectories for a variety of cases.
So top section here,
is for the static nozzle, the dumb nozzle.
And then, the lower image is here for the active nozzles.
When we simplify all that data,
we got these two charts here.
So bottom left, we looked a turning radius.
So in some applications, some of the missions,
there is actually times where you may actually,
imagine there's like a bogey following you,
you're an aircraft,
and you actually want to try and shoot the enemy
while they are behind you.
So turning radius in this case,
since we're using thrust vector control,
we can turn a lot faster than something with a fin control.
Fin control is limited by aerodynamic forces,
stall angles, stuff like that.
So with aerodynamic,
you're going to go something really wide,
you may miss them.
With thrust vector control, you can almost turn immediately,
and get them right when they're right behind you.
Quantitatively, we're looking
at about a 70% reduction there.
And then, in terms of range, we also crunched some numbers.
Blue is the baseline for the application that we looked at.
Gray is what we had quoted initially
during the phase two pitches.
We were eyeballing about 45% increase in range.
And then, based on our hot fire test,
we actually took what we learned from our hot fire test,
put it back in our model, reran the numbers,
and we're now actually, we were able
to squeeze another 15% or so performance out of that.
So we're now up to about 70% increase in range,
down to about 67% at some engagement angles.
So all things considered, very enabling technology,
accomplished by thrust vector control,
deep throttling, and drag elimination.
So there's three main enabling technologies that we bring.
Very broadly,
some other overall benefits of VTS technology,
so there's five major areas that we looked at.
Mission flexibility, again the key words are
active controllable propulsion.
And if you were to try to simplify it,
you consider that, or you can define it as
continuous throttling, or in some cases,
extinguishable in reading item able operation.
Overall that will give you increased operation time,
and when you combine it with our flexible on demand
thrust amplitude capability,
that gives you options for air-to-air, air-to-surface,
surface-to-air, and surface-to-surface engagements.
On top of that, we can operate in space,
because this actually where this technology was born from.
So pretty much anything you can think of,
we can probably accomplish.
We use a lot of state of the art materials
and manufacturing methods.
This gives you very high thrust capable systems,
which also shrinks down everything in overall size.
In sense of munitions, our preferred propellant is,
kind of what they call in the industry,
a wooden round propellant.
So it's very inert, it's very safe,
it's very easy for the bore fighter round.
So you can just drop it on the ground,
you don't have to worry about it blowing up on you.
MIL Standard 1901 compliance,
that's kind of the MIL Standard
for some very high end stuff.
Performance, all of that is there,
we have high accuracy thrusters, hot ring materials,
advanced insulators, and thermal coatings.
And then life cycle cost
is another big one that we're targeting.
So again, key here, is a drop in upgrade system,
so screw it out, screw it back in,
low cost, rapid transition opportunity.
Affordable through use of innovative materials,
solid propellant maintenance, safety, and storage.
And then, as I kind of mentioned previously,
that unique work around, height geometric tolerancing,
which may or may not be patentable.
`So where is this technology going?
Within the DOD, we work with quite a few branches.
So we've worked extensively with the Missile Defense Agency,
working on ballistic missile defense upgrades.
Over the past couple of years,
we've started working with
some of the hypersonic missile defenses areas.
Within the Air Force, they are looking at us
for a ground based strategic deterrent upgrade.
Navy, same thing, Navy strategic missiles.
And then, within the Army, what we've identified so far is,
the lower tier missile defense upgrade,
the 2.75 inch rocket loader upgrade,
which is what the second presentation is about.
We were introduced to the strategic long range cannon
artillery application, and then we actually ran
into someone in the exhibition halls,
where we may be able to apply this
to a scram jet type application as well for the Army.
So quite a few things for there Army,
on top of the existing branches that we work with.
Additionally, within the past couple months,
DARPA actually approached us and started looking at us
for the next generation air-to-air missile application.
So all around, a lot of potential,
a lot of insertion opportunities.
Capstone demonstration presentation prototype design.
So we went through a very extensive
engineering design process for all this.
In terms of the VTS engineering capabilities,
the aerospace division is about 10 people strong.
We bring about 12 years of SPR data rights,
and lot of in-house ,
and commercially available analysis capabilities.
On top of that, we have two patents on our technology,
as well as two patents pending.
And cumulatively, we have well over 100 years
of years of engineering capability.
And we're familiar with, all the way from concept,
all the way to actually delivering hardware to our customer.
Engineering process started off with a requirements review.
So we talked to our commercialization partner,
got some preliminary input from them,
and then put that all into here.
So you're looking at everything from performance,
environments, costs, life cycle, reliability,
all that was in our trade space.
Went through the preliminary design.
So I myself did a lot of the performance modeling
and system sizing, worked with mechanical engineers
to generate an actual concept,
which is the M teaser shown there.
On top of that, we did a lot of analysis
to make sure that all aspects of the design were covered.
And then on top of that, we looked at all the risks,
ranked them, and came up
with appropriate mitigation plans for that.
After all that, we actually fabricated some custom hardware,
and went into hot-fire tests with all this.
So, to summarize the tests though,
lots of good things happened.
The major risks that we burned are highlighted or bolded.
So one major thing was scaling it down to 3 inch diameter.
So it's a 3 inch diameter.
We're trying to do a lot in that small amount of volume.
We were able to do that very well.
Data was collected, and nothing funny happened.
Thrust was collected, and we put that again,
into our modeling, to squeeze out that extra 15%.
Successful ignition,
performance within desired performance bounds.
Videos and photos captured.
So this black box is a video, which I'll show momentarily.
No jamming, clogging, or excessive ablation.
Thermal margins are good.
Thermal shock survivability.
No combustion instability,
that was my biggest concern, at least.
And then ballistics verified.
So can we try to play that video momentarily?
So this is just a snippet of it.
This is only a small fraction.
The real test was many time longer.
(booster flames on)
And again, for sensitivity reasons,
I can't show the whole thing, and everything that happened,
or the exact detail data.
But we can show you afterward, if you want to.
So, overall, lots of risks were burned,
which is a lead in to my next chart.
Where do we go from here?
If we look at risk rankings,
at the beginning of the program,
we had quite a few yellows.
There were quite a few things that we were worried about.
The hot fire test brought everything down into green.
If we look at it from a technology readiness level,
definition, I can very confidently say that we are a TRL 4.
This was a component validation
in the laboratory environment.
Our commercialization partners,
kind of waiting to see what happens
after this competition pitch.
So, if this domino falls,
then we would actively engage them.
We would get their attention a lot more,
and we would push to do
a prototype flight demonstration of this hardware.
So, combined with VTS's high technology already,
and their capabilities,
we can definitely get to a flight
within TLR-5 or TLR-6 within, pretty quickly.
Overall in terms of acquisition,
if we got the go ahead to deploy this to some system,
we're confident, that again with our partnership,
we can get to actual TLR-9
within two and a half to four years.
And, transition plan.
So, unfortunately I don't name any of our prime partners,
for sensitivity reasons,
but I do identify some of our government sponsors
in our various branches.
So Missile Defense Agency,
this is probably our most mature customer.
We've been working with them many years.
Within the ballistic missile defense realm,
we actually have a test experiment,
or a flight demonstration,
happening about this time next year.
So we've got both the prime contractor
and a government sponsor working with us.
Hypersonic Missile Defense has already gotten
a lot of interest out of this.
Air Force, I think we're doing hover tests
for them in about a year as well.
Navy, we're doing very well.
That's about all I can say there.
And then the Army, for the lower tier missile defense,
we're working with Redstone, we're covered there.
2.75 inch rocket motor upgrade,
we're waiting for X-TECH to see what happens.
And then, strategic long range cannon,
we submitted a white paper a few months ago.
And we're waiting to hear back what happens about that.
We're very excited about that opportunity.
And then DARPA, this is a very new initiative.
Haven't made much progress there, but we're lead working it.
And then the final chart, just to kind of mention
the commercial applications that we have.
So this is isn't purely just DOD.
When many years back, we found an application
within the oil and gas industry,
we actually had teaming agreements, partnerships.
And we haven't even had a patent issued
for support of one of these applications.
Only problem being, then the oil industry kind of collapsed,
so that kind of fell out from under us.
Related to that would have been mining.
So again, were just waiting for the opportunity
for it to be economically viable again.
But we do have ideas for how to transition this
into the commercial world.
And these are two very big industries,
so this is like nine figures, ten figures sustainment,
if we were to get that.
And with that, I conclude my presentation.
- To switch the nozzle,
from a dumb nozzle to the smart nozzle,
what kind of weight difference?
How much weight difference is the smart nozzle?
- There is.
Do note that it was accounted for
in the flight ballistic modeling though.
So,
I don't think it's appropriate
to actually quote the number,
but it was a part of these analysis.
- Okay
- But it will go up, I agree.
- The video that you showed,
we saw just kind of ignition,
and then it sort of extinguishes.
Could you be more specific about what you,
to verify in terms of revectoring and vector control,
and those sorts of thing.
- It doesn't extinguish, it just kind of blacks out.
And then thrust vector control
is what we cannot demonstrate,
since this was only a single axis test.
So we were initially gonna do full three axes.
Due to cost and time, we can only do one axis.
So we did not verify thrust vector control,
but we got throttling.
- Do you have any data on nozzle ablation
when you're actually doing thrust vectoring,
or is that outside the scope of what you're demonstrating.
- Most of the materials don't really ablate.
For this one, it actually did.
So that was part of our database.
That was part of the lessons learned
that we got out of this technology demonstration.
- So you talked about the thrust vector control,
the deep throttling, and the third, the technical component.
Which do you feel is the most challenging
for you to try to overcome in terms
of demonstrating the full capability?
- Definitely range.
Throttling, throttling, and I kind of hinted towards it,
but extinguishment and re-ignition.
That's another key aspect of our technology.
And that's the part that no one else can really do.
So that's what Valley Tech brings to the party.
- You talked about the insensitive munitions,
so this will be propellant agnostic in the end state,
or you...
- Mm, hmm.
Propellant agnostic.
- The challenges.
Again, some of the applications you showed,
it seemed like the burn time was relatively short?
- [Allen] Mm, hmm.
- Do you see any problems with going a longer burn time,
a longer duration, at high temperatures,
just and the integrity of the structure that you built.?
- Mm, hmm.
That's all a part of our engineering capabilities.
We work a lot with hot running materials,
and advanced insulators.
- So how long was your test burn,
compared to a typical flight profile?
- Order of magnitude higher.
That's about all I can say.
- So as you move to the semi throttle there,
hardening concerns, in terms of being able
to secure it against compromised integrity,
somewhat, how you control the dynamics of what you're...
- I don't see how it could be compromised.
That's where are commercialization partner
would help out a lot.
They be able to recognize some of the communications
and control systems.
- [Questioner] Okay sir.
- [Moderator] Any other questions?
- For the existing systems
that you've shown and talked about,
non-standard range cannon,
do envision this material, or your modified rounds,
having the same form-fit and function
with the, say the 19-shot rocket pod,
or the 1-5-5 Howitzer,
or do you envision, or can you share with us at all
how that would integrate to those existing platforms?
- Form and fit would definitely be the same.
It's not gonna unscrew and upgrade though.
That's gonna take a lot more work.
It's pretty much gonna be a custom artillery round.
But we're still targeting the standard 155 millimeter.
I think that's the Howitzer diameter.
- So you're TRL-4 to component level
in terms of the scale of manufacturing,
I'm assuming their using mostly cost items?
Hows..?
- It comes from our many years of experience.
We've developed those materials, we keep it,
we work with it extensively.
We're comfortable with it.
- Have you performed high-G tests,
in your collaboration with Picatinny?
- Nope.
That was part of our white paper.
That's pretty much the first thing
we will be doing with them.
High-G survivability.
- How are you to handle the very high rates
of acceleration of spin
when you're dealing
with long range artillery shells?
I mean, many orders of magnitude more than,
(mumbles)
(cough)
- We would love a contract to answer that question.
(laughing)
- [Man in Back Of Room] Well my company is one of several
contractors in Picaninny arsenal working
on extended weapons ammunition.
Let's talk about that.
- Okay, we need to talk than.
- [Moderator] Any other questions?
Okay
- Thank you