Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) reviews completed by Raytheon for Navy
NewsJuly 28, 2014
TEWKSBURY, Mass.. Raytheon engineers finished two critical program reviews for the Navy's Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) -- the hardware Preliminary Design Review and the Integrated Baseline Review.
Customer, program, and technical stakeholders from various Navy program offices and the Missile Defense Agency participated in each review, assessing the maturity of the AMDR design, its alignment to requirements, and the master plan for program execution.
"With the technology risks retired in the earlier Technology Development (TD) phase and cost reduction initiatives already implemented, we're now fully focused on the fabrication of the AMDR system and completion of the Engineering & Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase," says Raytheon's Kevin Peppe, vice president of Integrated Defense Systems' Seapower Capability Systems business area.
For the Technology Development phase of the competition, Raytheon engineers constructed a partially populated, full-sized array (see photo), including the signal and data processing back-end. The AMDR array, completed in just over a year, demonstrated the design, capability and scalability of the radar and served as the foundation for ongoing risk reduction and affordability initiatives. A 14 foot, full-size array structure was built to demonstrate fit within a DDG 51 Flight III deck house, including the mechanical interface, cabling, piping and maintenance elements.
The array was partially populated with a small number of Radar Modular Assemblies (RMAs) containing more than 1,000 Gallium Nitride (GaN) transmit-receive modules, meeting TD phase requirements and representing a configuration for a smaller radar aperture. The scaled radar integrated all critical technology elements in the far-field range and exercised and tested all technologies in a relevant environment. Concurrently, Raytheon ran a series of design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) and cost-reduction initiatives on all the array electronics to address affordability early. With TD phase completed, technology risks were retired, ship fit was addressed, and affordability was designed in from the onset.
Raytheon's AMDR is built with the RMAs that can be grouped to form any size radar aperture, either smaller or larger than today's SPY-1D(V). All cooling, power, command logic and software are inherently scalable, which enables new instantiations, as well as back-fits, without hefty development costs.
