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The Anglo-French consortium that develops technology for the British and French missile defence programmes is to be renewed this summer and will run for another five years.
Research projects being run under the Materials and Components for Missiles Innovation and Technology Partnership (MCM ITP) will end next month and phase-two projects start in September.
According to pan-European missile technology company MBDA, which leads the industrial consortium, the final sign-off of the agreement will happen during July.
Speaking at the MCM ITP conference in Lille last month, Richard Brooks, director of the programme office at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, said: “This is a technology partnership with innovation at its heart. It’s the right business model with the right aim – cost-effective capability that gives the governments freedom of action – it gives them options. Now we need to take the technology and give our customers equipment they can exploit in the military domain.”
The MCM ITP, which was formed in 2008, involves 90 British and French companies, half of which are small and medium-sized enterprises. The consortium is funded 50/50 by France and the UK, and 50/50 by industry and government. It costs €14 million a year. The consortium is focused on early-stage R&D that can be developed into missile technology for use between 2020 and 2030.
Mark Owen, head of the consortium, said: “ITP projects are trying to develop new capabilities, increase performance or drive costs down. One interesting project is using a technique called wavefront coding to take complex lens systems out of the missiles. It replaces the optics with the same technology that is being used to drive down the cost of mobile-phone cameras.”
Wavefront coding uses a lens to mask an image so it is out of focus at a constant amount. It then processes the digital image to remove the blur. It is often used in mobile-phone cameras to produce autofocus without a complex, expensive lens.
Infra-red missiles use complex systems of lenses made of expensive materials to process images over a wide range of temperatures and forces. The use of wavefront coding could reduce the number of lenses in a missile from seven to two, cutting their weight by up 10%, increasing performance and reducing cost.
“More and more often we are looking at the commercial sector and leveraging it into the military domain,” Owen added. “The next phase is to pull this technology out of the lab and on to missiles.”
Other projects are developing cheaper composite materials that can withstand the high temperatures and forces of hypersonic flight, and wings with moving leading and trailing edges.