Development of X-43A Mach 10 Leading Edges

The nose leading edge of the Hyper-X Mach 10 vehicle was orginally anticipated to reach temperatures near 4000 F at the leading-edge stagnation line. A SiC coated carbon/carbon (C/C) leading-edge material will not survive that extreme temperature for even a short duration single flight. To identify a suitable leading edge for the Mach 10 vehicle, arc-jet testing was performed on thirteen leading-edge segments fabricated from different material systems to evaluate their performance in a simulated flight environment. Hf, Zr, Si, and Ir based materials, in most cases as a coating on C/C, were included in the evaluation. Afterwards, MER, Tucson, AZ was selected as the supplier of the flight vehicle leading edges. The nose and the vertical and horizontal tail leading edges were fabricated out of a 3:1 biased high thermal conductivity C/C. The leading edges were coated with a three layer coating comprised of a SiC conversion of the top surface of the C/C, followed by a chemical vapor deposited layer of SiC, followed by a thin chemical vapor deposited layer of HfC. This paper will describe the fabrication of the Mach 10 C/C leading edges and the testing performed to validate performance

Battery-Operated High-Bandwidth Multi-Channel Wireless Neural Recording System Using 802.11b

Abstract-This paper reports the design of a batteryoperated, high bandwidth, multi-channel wireless medical telemetry system. The system is capable of transmitting 2.3Mbps of raw streaming data using the IEEE 802.11b protocol. In a typical application, the system was used to collect data from micro-wire electrodes implanted in the ventral striatum of an awake and behaving rat. The complete system weighs 87g (without battery) and consumes 2.7W