Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

INTRODUCTION

All of the expensive technology that goes into a fighter jet. Attack
helicopter or bomber wouldn’t be much use on the battlefield with out any
ordnance.while there’re not as expensive or complex as the military that
carry them guns, missiles and bombs are pretty impressive aircraft in their
own right. Smart weapons don’t just sail through the air: they actually find
their own way to the target.

One of the oldest and most successful smart weapons in the U.S
arsenal, the legendry AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. The small and simple
sidewinder is a highly effective combination of electronics and explosive
power, brought together with incredible technical ingenuity.

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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

SMART WEAPONS

The Sidewinder AIM-9 (air intercept missile 9) is classified as a

short-range, air-to-air missile. Simply put, its job is to launch from an
airborne aircraft and "kill" an enemy aircraft (damage it to the point that it
goes down). Missiles like the Sidewinder are called smart weapons because
they have built-in seeking systems that let them home in on a target.

Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force

The Sidewinder is a short-range missile for air-to-air combat.

The technology of smart weapons really got going in the decade

following World War II. Most early guided weapon prototypes were built
around radar technology, which proved to be expensive and problematic.
These missiles had their own radar sensors, but obviously could not carry
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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

their own radar transmitters. For the guidance system to lock on an enemy
plane, some remote radar system had to "illuminate" the target by bouncing
radar beams off of it. In most cases, this meant the pilot had to keep the
aircraft in a vulnerable position after firing in order to keep a radar lock on
the enemy until the missile could find it. Additionally, the radar equipment
in the missile was large and expensive, which made for a high-cost, bulky
weapon. Most of these missiles had something around a 90 percent failure
rate (nine shots out of 10 missed their targets).

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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

HEAT SENSING

In 1947, a Naval physicist named Bill McLean took it upon himself

to build a better system -- a missile that would seek out the heat from an
enemy aircraft's engine system. Since the missile would home in on the
target's own emitted energy, rather than reflected radio energy, the pilot
could "fire and forget" -- that is, he could launch the missile and get clear.
In place of the bulky radar equipment, the missile would use a relatively
small heat-sensing photovoltaic cell to "see" the target. This meant it could
be built much smaller than the current radar prototypes, and at a much
lower cost

Officially, the Navy had no interest in non-radar guidance systems,

but at the China Lake, California, Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS)
where McLean was employed, researchers had enough freedom to pursue
unconventional projects. Under the guise of missile fuze development,
McLean and his colleagues worked out the design of the first Sidewinder
prototypes. Six years later, in September 1953, the missile had its first
successful test run.

Since that time, the Sidewinder has taken a number of different

forms, each model adding new technology and capabilities (check out F-
16.net: AIM-9 Sidewinder for details on the specific models). While today's
semiconductor guidance systems are a lot more advanced than the vacuum
tubes on the original designs, the overall operation is pretty close. In the
next couple of sections, we'll examine the current Sidewinder model, the
AIM-9M, and also take a peek at its upcoming replacement, the AIM-9X.

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THE COMPONENTS

As we saw in the last section, the central idea of the Sidewinder

system is to home in on the heat, or infrared energy, from an enemy
aircraft (from the engine exhaust or from the hot fuselage itself).
Essentially, the missile's job is to keep flying toward the infrared energy
until it reaches the target. Then the missile blows up, destroying the enemy
aircraft.

To do all of this, the Sidewinder needs nine major components:

 The rocket motor, which provides the thrust to propel the missile
through the air

 The rear stabilizing wings, which provide the necessary lift to keep
the missile aloft

 The seeker, which sees the infrared light from the target

 The guidance control electronics, which process the information

from the seeker and calculate the proper course for the missile

 The control actuation section, which adjusts flight fins near the
nose of the missile based on instructions from the guidance
electronics

 The flight fins themselves, which steer the missiles through the air --
just like the flaps on an airplane wing, the moving flight fins
generate drag (increase wind resistance) on one side of the missile,
causing it to turn in that direction.

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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

 The warhead, the explosive device that actually destroys the enemy
aircraft

 A fuze system that sets the warhead off when the missile reaches the
target

 A battery to provide power to the onboard electronics

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SIDEWINDER STATS (FOR THE AIM-9M)

 Length: 9 feet, 5 inches (~2.9 m)

 Diameter: 5 inches (~13 cm)
 Weight: 188 pounds (~85 kg)
 Finspan: 2 feet, 3/4 of an inch (~63 cm)
 Cost: $84,000
 Top Speed: Mach 2.5
 Range: 18 miles (~29 km)

THE SYSTEM
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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

To see how all these pieces work together, let's examine a typical
attack sequence.

Before launching, the missile sits under one of the aircraft's wings,
mounted to a launcher on the wing by several hangers. An "umbilical
cable" near the nose of the missile connects the onboard electronic control
system to the aircraft's computer system. When the pilot gets the plane in
position -- ideally, behind the enemy -- he or she activates the fire control.
The aircraft computer sends a command to the missile control system to
activate the Mk 36 rocket motor and release the missile.

The rocket motor burns up solid propellant material to generate a

high-pressure gas that streams out the back of the missile (the motor uses
special low-smoke propellant material to help hide the missile from the
enemy). This provides the initial thrust necessary to get the missile off the
launcher and push it through the air at supersonic speeds (the current model
flies at about Mach 2.5). Once the propellant has burned up, the missile
glides the rest of the way to its target.

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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

Photo courtesy U.S. Navy

A Sidewinder launches from an F/A-18 Hornet.

Each of the four rear wings, which provide the necessary lift to keep
the missile flying, is outfitted with a simple stabilizing device called a
rolleron. Basically, a rolleron is a metal wheel with notches cut into it. As
the missile speeds through the air, the air current spins the rolleron like a
pinwheel.

Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Defense

The rollerons on the rear wings help stabilize the missile in flight.
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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

If you've read How Gyroscopes Work, you know that a spinning

wheel resists lateral forces acting on it. In this case, the gyroscopic motion
counteracts the missile's tendency to roll -- to rotate about its central axis.
The simple, cheap rollerons steady the missile as it zips through the air,
which keeps the seeker assembly from spinning at top speed. This makes it
a lot easier to track the target, as we'll see in the next section.

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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

TRACKING: INFRARED

The Sidewinder seeker is something like the CCD in a video camera.

It has an array of sensors that generate an electrical signal when exposed to
the infrared light given off by hot objects. Since it only sees things in terms
of "very hot" and "not very hot," the infrared system is much simpler than a
visible-light detection system (an ordinary video camera). Additionally,
infrared seekers don't need an outside light source, so they work perfectly
well night or day.

Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Defense

The Sidewinder's seeker head assembly and flight fins

In the current Sidewinder models, the infrared sensor array is

coupled with a conical scanning system. The basic idea of a conical
scanning system is to continually move the feed horn -- the assembly of
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lenses and mirrors that directs light to the sensor -- around in a small circle
(to visualize this, imagine holding the eraser end of a pencil steady in one
hand while moving the pointed end around in a circle). As a whole, the
moving feedhorn scans a large section of the sky. The guidance control
system figures out where the target is based on fluctuations in the detected
infrared light as the feed horn moves around the circle. If the target is to the
left of the missile, for example, the sensor will detect greater infrared light
when the feed horn is aimed to the left than when it is aimed to the right.

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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

TRACKING: GUIDANCE CONTROL SYSTEM

The guidance control system's main goal is to keep the infrared

image of the enemy aircraft roughly centered so that the missile nose
continues to point toward the target. If the infrared image moves off center,
the control system sends a signal to the servo assembly. The servo
assembly includes a gas generator that feeds high-pressure gas to
pneumatic pistons. The pistons are connected to rocker arms, which move
the fins back and forth. The command signal from guidance control
activates electric solenoids, which open and close valves leading to these
pistons in order to tilt the fins from side to side

To compensate for the target's own motion, the control system uses a
strategy called proportional navigation. The basic idea of this approach is
to over-compensate course corrections. The control system evaluates how
far off center the target is, and adjusts its angle of flight proportionally,
based on a multiplier. If the multiplier were 2, for example, and the missile
were 10 degrees off course, the missile would change its flight direction by
20 degrees. Then, a tenth of a second later it would re-evaluate its heading,
and adjust the fins again.

By over-correcting in this way, the control system anticipates the

path of the moving target, in much the same way a quarterback throws a
ball just ahead of a running receiver, anticipating where the receiver will be
when the ball actually arrives.

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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

INFLICTING DAMAGE: OPTICAL TARGET

DETECTOR

The Sidewinder isn't designed to go off when it actually hits the

target; it's designed to go off when it gets very close to the target. The
missile control system uses an ingenious optical target detector to figure
out when it's within range.

The detector consists of eight laser-emitter diodes and eight light-

sensor diodes arranged around the outside of the missile airframe, just
behind the flight fins. When the Sidewinder is in flight, the detector is
constantly emitting laser beams in a spoke pattern around the missile. If the
missile gets close enough to the target, the laser beams will reflect off the
aircraft body and bounce back to the sensor diodes. The control system
recognizes that the missile is right next to the target and triggers the
warhead.

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INFLICTING DAMAGE: WDU-17/B WARHEAD

The current Sidewinder, as well as its replacement, the AIM-9X,

carries the 20-pound (9-kg) WDU-17/B warhead. The WDU-17/B consists
of a case assembly, a good amount of PBXN-3 high explosive, booster
plates, an initiator device and nearly 200 titanium fragmentation rods.
When the target detector senses the enemy aircraft, it activates the fuze
mechanism, which sends an explosive charge through the initiator (a train
of low-explosive material) to the booster plates. The explosive charge from
the initiator ignites low-explosive material in the booster plate channels,
which ignites explosive pellets surrounding the high-explosive material.
The pellets ignite the high explosive, causing it to release a huge amount of
hot gas in a short amount of time.

The powerful explosive force from this expanding gas blasts the
titanium rods outward, breaking them apart to form thousands of metal
pieces, all zipping through the air at top speed. If the warhead goes off
within range of the target, the speeding titanium fragments will break apart
the enemy aircraft's fuselage. In some cases, the missile may go right up
the target's tailpipe, demolishing the aircraft from the inside. The WDU-
17/B is referred to as an annular blast fragmentation warhead because
the explosive force carries the metal fragments outward in all directions, in
an annular, or ring-shaped, pattern.

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ADVANTAGES

Low cost of development and ownership compared to other missiles.

Superior performance exceeds tactical requirement. The sidewinder
missiles are one such missiles which was the heat sensing technology. The
sidewinder missiles are the leader in advanced infrared missiles and
weapon systems.

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CONCLUSION

The technology of smart weapons really got going in the decade

following World War II. Most early guided weapon prototypes were built
around radar technology, which proved to be expensive and problematic.

The Sidewinder AIM-9 is classified as a short-range, air-to-air

missile. Simply put, its job is to launch from an airborne aircraft and "kill"
an enemy aircraft .Missiles like the Sidewinder are called smart weapons
because they have built-in seeking systems that let them home in on a
target.

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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

REFERENCE

 WWW.HOWSTUFFWORKS.COM.

 NASA QUEST.

 MIT PRESS JOURNALS.

 THE BUSINESS JOURNAL PHOENIX.

 AMERICAN CITY BUSINESS JOURNAL.

 www.seminarsonly.com

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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

ABSTRACT

In the present age, a large effort is being made to prevent wars. But
the lion’s share of any countries budget is devoted to defence various
powerful weapons are used for eliminating the enemy planes, bunkers and
tankers. Of this, the most commonly used and effective weapons are
missiles. Unlike the old conventional missiles using radar technology
which is expensive and problematic, a high level research and testing are
going on for improving the accuracy and efficiency of weapons, maximum
stress is given to prevent the failure keeping this in mind, an ingenious idea
that came up was HEAT SEEKING MIISSILES. Side winder missiles are
one such missile which was the heat sensing technology.

This seminar will provide an overview of the specification working,

parts and advantages of side winder missiles.

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Sidewinder Missile Seminar Report

CONTENTS

 INTRODUCTION

 SMART WEAPONS

 HEAT SENSING

 THE COMPONENTS

 SIDEWINDER STATS (FOR THE AIM-9M)

 THE SYSTEM

 TRACKING: INFRARED

 TRACKING: GUIDANCE CONTROL SYSTEM

 INFLICTING DAMAGE: OPTICAL TARGET DETECTOR

 INFLICTING DAMAGE: WDU-17/B WARHEAD

 ADVANTAGES

 CONCLUSION

 REFERENCE

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