AAWSAP DIRD, MHD Air Breathing Propulsion and Power for Aerospace Applications, November 2010

This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 21 November 2010, was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office under its Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It reviews propulsion concepts that use weakly ionized plasmas and magnetohydrodynamics for hypersonic flight and spacecraft. It concludes that the Ajax MHD energy bypass concept is meaningless below Mach 12. A reverse energy bypass with a Virtual Cowl is judged potentially practical, and electric propulsion is expected to become standard for spacecraft.

From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 11/21/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD surveys magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) and plasma-based concepts for air-breathing propulsion, onboard power generation, and aerodynamic control, arguing that such systems could in principle extend aerospace performance beyond the limits of conventional chemical propulsion and control surfaces. The report reviews concepts including MHD acceleration, flow control, inlet control, onboard power generation, drag reduction, and plasma-generated “virtual” aerodynamic surfaces, while giving particular attention to hypersonic applications such as scramjet power extraction, reentry vehicles, global-strike gliders, and aero-assisted orbital maneuvers. However, it emphasizes major practical constraints, especially extreme power requirements, system weight and complexity, and the difficulty of achieving useful ionization in colder air at lower hypersonic speeds; on that basis, it argues that Ajax-style MHD bypass concepts, in which energy is extracted from the airflow upstream and reintroduced downstream through an electromagnetic system, are not meaningful below about Mach 12, while treating the “virtual cowl” and related reentry applications as more plausible. The document presents plasma and MHD aerospace systems as a technically serious but highly demanding field whose nearer-term promise lies in specialized hypersonic control, power generation, and reentry applications rather than a fully realized air-breathing propulsion system.

UNCLASSIFIED/ /POR. OPPl@IAL ~91!!! OHL¥
E-beams B field
forebody vehicle
Flow inlet
Cowl lip
Figure 6. MHD Control of Scramjet Inlet Using E-Beam Ionization. The retarding
ampere force restores the shock-on-lip condition at Mach numbers higher than the
design value.
THE AJAX CONCEPT: MHD BYPASS
An MHD-assisted propulsion concept that has attracted perhaps the most
attention over the last decade or two is known as the Ajax, or Ayaks. The
concept, illustrated in Figure 7, orig inated in the 1980s at Leninetz Scientific &
Production Enterprise (now Leninetz Holding Co.) in Leningrad, USSR (now St.
Petersburg, Russia). A good overview of the concept and its present status and
problems can be found in the recent article23 included in the Special Section of
the Journal of Propulsion and Power devoted to weakly ionized gases for
propulsion enhancement, with one of the authors of this survey serving as
special guest editor.
UNCLASSIFIED/FAA OFF1&1AI:: ~9E et•t I
15