With the rapid development of high energy laser weapons (HELWs), the integration of HELW on unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) has become a hot research topic. To study the impact of HELW on UCAV mission effectiveness, this paper proposes a 4-level design framework based on the system-of-system (SoS) oriented design. To validate the framework, the impact of HELW is analyzed in four aspects: the strike capability, the stealth performance, the vulnerability, and the defense capability, where the UCAV design constrains are noted. Simulation experiments of penetration scenario are carried out using agent-based modeling and simulation. The simulation results show that the integration of HELW can increase the survivability and mission effectiveness rate (MER) of the UCAV, especially for UCAVs with high speed and stealth performance. But the MER of the UCAV does not increase with the increase of HELW output power in most cases, indicating the importance of balancing the HELW and UCAV performances in concept design.

Inerting is an important measure to prevent fire and explosion, and enhance the survivability of an aircraft. In the battle environment, the hits from the projectiles or fragments on the fuel tank may affect the inerting effectiveness. By modifying the traditional scrubbing inerting model, this paper proposes a new inerting analysis method considering the impact of the projectiles. A series of events are introduced including the changes in either of the velocity and temperature of the projectiles, the air increase in the ullage brought by the projectiles, and the heat transfer between the projectiles and the surroundings. Examples show that the fuel load has significant effect on the oxygen concentration and the vapor/air ratio, while the velocity, the mass and the temperature of the projectile have less effect on the two parameters. In addition, the changes in the flight altitude have almost no effect on the vapor/air ratio, while having little effect on the oxygen concentration. Moreover, when the fuel tank suffers multiple hits by the projectiles, the ignition possibility or vulnerability in the ullage will increase significantly.

Variation modes of avian wings offer large-scale morphing aircraft an effective approach for solving problems such as the mass center shift in longitudinal trim and control system design during the morphing process. In this paper, a numerical method is established for fully understanding the influence of combined morphing on roll efficiency of a biomimetic wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) from the perspective of aerodynamic change, system convergence time and aerodynamic energy consumption. Analysis and simulation results show that the biomimetic wing provides effective measures to improve the mission execution efficiency of UAV. System oscillation can obviously be reduced with asymmetric sweep angle change as the supervisory control surface for pure roll maneuver, and actuators require higher output power than that with the single deflection of the flexible trailing edge (Flex-TE). In addition, for aircraft design, a larger mass ratio of the inner wing is beneficial to enhance system stability. Energy consumption of wing and Flex-TE show laws of first increasing and then decreasing along the spanwise direction during the morphing process. For actuators of the Flex-TE, the output power of units 1 to 15 should higher than other spanwise units. For the sweep angle generalized control surface, the maximum value of energy consumption per unit time is located near the 20-th spanwise unit.