Issue 02, 2017

Several Approaches and Practices for Technical Status Management in Model Development within a Digital Design Environment

Chen Minghui, Li Wei, Zhao Xingguo, Zhang Zongyi

Currently, digital design has been widely adopted in the machinery manufacturing and printing industries both domestically and internationally. In recent years, it has also gained strong traction in China’s defense‑industrial sector, where it has been integrated into the development of multiple platforms—such as the FC‑1 fighter jet and large aircraft—enabling collaborative design, virtual prototype testing, and digital manufacturing in a seamless, end‑to‑end workflow. This approach has significantly shortened development cycles, reduced R&D costs, and delivered substantial social and economic benefits. However, for digital design methodologies that generate product data as their primary output, conventional technical configuration management practices and approaches struggle to meet the demands of advanced program development, underscoring an urgent need to devise tailored technical configuration management strategies that align with the unique characteristics of digital design.

Management and Control of Prohibited (or Restricted) Processes for Aerospace Product Models

Liu Qi, Liu Mingquan, Wang Hui, Zhao Chunzhang, Liu Xin

To ensure the quality of aerospace product models and effectively reduce environmental pollution and hazards arising during their manufacturing processes, China’s aerospace industry has, since the 1990s, implemented management and control measures for processes subject to bans or restrictions. Through years of research and experience accumulation, a relatively comprehensive catalog of prohibited or restricted processes, along with corresponding management requirements, has been developed. These measures are rigorously enforced across design, production, subcontracting, and outsourcing stages, yielding positive results. To help more designers, process engineers, and managers better understand the prohibited or restricted processes for aerospace product models and their associated management requirements, this paper focuses on defining these processes and outlining their control principles, while also detailing key control points at each stage—design, production, subcontracting, and outsourcing—and offering recommendations for follow-up actions.

Comparison and Analysis of Temperature-Control System Schemes for Missile Launch Vehicles—High-Strength

Wang Fengguo, Lu Weijian, Gulinna, Li Min

A missile launch vehicle is a specialized vehicle equipped with multiple functions, including transportation, erection, and missile launch. A temperature‑control system is an artificial system that employs heating, cooling, and other measures to create and maintain, within a designated space, air temperature and humidity levels that meet specified requirements. As one of the critical subsystems of a missile launch vehicle, its primary function is to provide an appropriate thermal and hygrometric environment for personnel in the cab and for the missiles stored in the launch canister. A comfortable cabin environment ensures good mental state, enhancing operational and command capabilities, while suitable temperature and humidity inside the launch canister help maximize missile performance. The performance of the temperature‑control system has thus become an important indicator of the vehicle’s technological sophistication. For a particular model of launch vehicle, the heating scheme of its temperature‑control system combines fuel‑based heating with electric resistance‑wire heating, while several cooling approaches have been proposed. This paper does not address the heating options but focuses solely on comparing and analyzing the available cooling strategies for the temperature‑control system.

Accelerated Life Testing of Semiconductor Power Devices: A Research Study

Mao Yuanyuan, Xu Jin, Lang Xiulan

In recent years, the growing demand for detecting low-observable and long-range targets has significantly influenced the development of active phased-array radars, driving continuous improvements in their performance. Semiconductor power devices, owing to their high power, high efficiency, high integration, and high reliability, have found increasingly widespread application in active phased-array radars. By increasing the radiated power per unit area while keeping the antenna array’s aperture size constant, these devices enhance the radar’s operational capabilities. High reliability is one of the key attributes of semiconductor power devices. When assessing the lifetime of components requiring long service life and high reliability, conventional long-term endurance tests conducted under normal stress conditions can be extremely resource‑intensive, consuming substantial manpower, materials, and time; in some cases, components are discarded before the tests are even completed. The mean time to failure (MTTF) accelerated life test represents the most fundamental and direct approach for evaluating a component’s reliability. This method involves applying elevated stress levels to induce early failure within a short timeframe, thereby enabling predictions of the component’s lifespan under normal storage and operating conditions.

Applied Research on Reliability Enhancement Testing Techniques for Shipborne Air-Defense Missile Electronic Systems

Yang Lifeng, Lü Ying, Zhang Wei

For a long time, traditional environmental‑simulation reliability test standards have been the primary means of ensuring the reliability of military‑industrial products. These tests are characterized by their effort to closely replicate the typical real‑world conditions of the mission profile, thereby assessing the product’s reliability level. However, they are time‑consuming and may not adequately reveal certain critical reliability issues. Moreover, during the early stages of product design, it is often difficult to accurately simulate the actual mission environment; as a result, potential weak points in the product may remain undetected. Conversely, blindly increasing design margins to enhance reliability can significantly drive up production costs. Therefore, it is essential to develop specialized testing techniques that can swiftly identify product weaknesses and enable more targeted improvements to boost reliability.

Concept for Building a Quality and Reliability Support Organization

Chang Qing, Wang Liwei, Dong Liyun, Li Jingyuan, Xie Boyu

Currently, the aerospace industry is entering a new phase of strategic development. Emerging systems, evolving circumstances, and shifting mission requirements are placing increasingly stringent demands on aerospace products. There is growing emphasis on mastering and applying cutting-edge technologies, as well as on enhancing product reliability and maturity. Meanwhile, production volumes for launch vehicles and weapon systems continue to expand, making it imperative to leverage specialized technical support organizations to build distinct professional and technological advantages, streamline program‑development processes, and integrate domain‑specific expertise into these workflows—thereby ensuring robust technical assurance for program success. Consequently, strengthening the development and management of specialized technical support entities, fully harnessing their technical and resource strengths, and achieving rapid advancements and breakthroughs in both R&D and manufacturing capabilities have become among the key and most challenging priorities in today’s quality‑management landscape.

Research on Software Process Improvement Based on GJB 5000A

Cheng Beibei, Yu Zhiyong, He Yumin

        Throughout the evolution of China’s weapons‑system development, the relative share of software and hardware has undergone a transformative shift. As the proportion of software has steadily risen, its role has grown stronger, while system complexity has increased accordingly. Concurrent with the accelerated transition from mechanization to digitalization, software scale has expanded from a few hundred or a few thousand lines of code in the early stages to tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of lines, and the number of software engineers has experienced exponential growth. Many factors influence software quality, including software inspection and software metrics. To enhance software quality, it is essential to strengthen process management during the development phase. If software quality control is not rigorously enforced at the outset, addressing issues only after they arise often proves too late. Software quality assurance hinges primarily on effective control of the software development process, which is inherently interdependent; any oversight can lead to unforeseen consequences, underscoring that the quality of the software process ultimately determines the quality of the software itself.

Risk Factor Analysis and Countermeasures Throughout the Spacecraft’s Full Life Cycle

Yu Jin, Zhou Su Run

The full life cycle of a spacecraft comprises five major phases: project initiation and feasibility studies, conceptual design, development and manufacturing, testing and verification, and on-orbit operations. Spacecraft development is characterized by high technical complexity, broad interdisciplinary scope, strong exploratory elements, substantial capital investment, and extended development timelines. Consequently, each phase constitutes a complex systems engineering endeavor, subject to both internal and external factors that cannot be fully anticipated. These factors not only give rise to risks in the spacecraft development process but may also directly determine whether the spacecraft can successfully accomplish its mission.

Practices in Technical Risk Management within the Spacecraft Environmental Testing Process

Sun Wei, Gao Qinghua, Zhai Yi

Due to the complex systems, lengthy development cycles, high costs, limited production volumes, and the inability to perform direct on-orbit repairs of spacecraft, it is essential to conduct comprehensive environmental testing prior to launch. Spacecraft environmental testing is a highly complex undertaking that encompasses facilities, equipment, personnel, documentation, materials, tools, and software, characterized by a wide variety of test types, sophisticated technologies, a high degree of integration, significant impacts, extensive interdepartmental involvement, and intricate command-and‑operation procedures. Consequently, spacecraft systems are subject to numerous risk factors; any unforeseen issue within the system could potentially trigger problems [1]. Environmental testing plays a critical role in validating the design and manufacturing quality of spaceflight hardware. From a risk-management perspective, such testing serves as an effective measure to mitigate development risks, yet it also introduces its own set of risks—ranging from financial and schedule uncertainties to technical challenges. Therefore, during environmental testing, it is imperative to implement a range of measures to minimize or eliminate potential risks and to adopt a systematic approach to risk management, thereby ensuring the success of the testing process.

Strengthen the development of third‑level documentation, and promote the effective operation of the quality management system and the continuous enhancement of organizational capabilities.

Yu Hou Man

The third‑level documents are those identified by the organization as necessary to ensure the effective planning, operation, and control of its processes; they serve as operational guidance and typically include work instructions, standards, specifications, manuals, guidelines, forms, and similar materials. After establishing their quality manuals and procedural documents, some organizations fail to give adequate attention to developing third‑level documentation, resulting in a number of common issues. Moreover, in some cases, the understanding of third‑level documents remains confined to the level of quality management system development, without being elevated to the broader perspective of organizational capability building. …

Research and Implementation of an Integrated Verification System for High-Efficiency Transponders in Communication Satellites

Hou Weiguo, Li Yinqiao, Liu Jian, Xia Weina

The payload of a communications satellite primarily comprises the transponder subsystem and the antenna subsystem. As a critical component of the payload, the transponder subsystem typically accounts for more than 85% of the total number of individual units in the payload. With advances in communications satellite platform technology, the capacity to accommodate transponders has steadily increased—evolving from the initial few transponders to over 200 today—while customer demand for satellite capacity continues to grow in both volume and sophistication. Traditional transponder test and evaluation systems were designed around earlier platforms that supported only a few or a dozen transponders; they can no longer meet the requirements of modern systems handling hundreds of transponders, let alone the even greater numbers anticipated with future E‑5‑class platforms. Consequently, developing and designing a new generation of high‑efficiency, rapid transponder test and analysis systems to replace conventional approaches has become imperative.

Increase the first-pass yield of electron-beam welding for enclosures.

Gao Lijiao, Hu Xiaoyong, Wang Heping, Xiong Liangtong

The titanium alloy housing, as a critical structural component in the manufacture of a certain product, plays an indispensable role throughout the production process. The housing is assembled by electron-beam welding of multiple sub‑assemblies, and the first‑pass yield of this welding process directly impacts the overall delivery quality of the product. The company mandates that the first‑pass yield for batch‑produced units must exceed 85%; however, the current first‑pass yield for this particular housing stands at only 67.5%, severely jeopardizing on-time delivery and the achievement of quality objectives. Consequently, improving the first‑pass yield of electron-beam welding has become an urgent priority. Following deliberation, the team has designated “Improving the First‑Pass Yield of Electron‑Beam Welding for the Housing” as its research topic.