The Assessment Method for Multi-Azimuth and Multi-Frequency Dynamic Integrated Stealth Performance of Aircraft

Abstract

Stealth technology of aircraft, known as one of the three technological revolutions together with high-energy laser weapons and cruise missiles in the development history of military science since 1980s, has become the third milestone after jet engines and swept wings technology in modern aviation history. Stealth aircraft has been also considered as one of the ten greatest inventions of the U.S. ADARPA (Defense Advance Research Project Agency). Nowadays, stealth technology has become one key technology. The countries all over the world have paid great attention and strived to develop the stealth technology. Reasonable assessment method for stealth performance plays a crucial role in the development of advanced stealth technology. For example, the result of the stealth performance assessment of aircraft can provide reference for modifying the aircraft’s stealth design to achieve a higher stealth performance. Meanwhile, it can also provide reference for making some specific strategies to increase the probability of successful tasks by reducing the detecting probability of the radar or radar network. Nowadays, the electronic battlefield is becoming more complex and it is urgent to build up a new method to analyze the multiazimuth and multi-frequency dynamic integrated stealth performance of aircraft, under the complex electronic environment. The existing stealth performance assessment methods include two types. One is the static stealth performance assessment method, the other is the stealth assessment method based on the effectiveness of combat simulation. The former just uses the average RCS value of target circumferential area, or that of some critical radar detecting areas, under some important radar frequencies as the basis. And the latter uses aircraft’s survival probability (including detection probability, hitting probability and damage probability) in specific combat tasks as the basis to assess the stealth performance of aircraft. Each method can reflect the characteristics of the target’s stealth performance well. However, there are still some limitations such as: the results based on the two methods can’t reflect the impact on aircraft stealth performance caused by different target scattering characteristics. As not taking the certain combat task and detecting environment into consideration, the results also fail to reflect the dynamic characteristics of stealth performance, which happens in the entire