As global airspace regulations evolve and drone usage surges, accurately tracking multiple UAVs in dynamic swarm formations has become a pressing challenge for aerial safety, urban air mobility, and counter-drone operations. A research team from Beijing Institute of Technology has developed a novel visual tracking framework that significantly improves the identification and tracking of visually similar drones with nonlinear motion in air-to-air scenarios. Their work marks a major step toward scalable, intelligent swarm drone monitoring in real-world applications.

With the increasing focus on the pursuit-evasion game, the guidance law capturability analysis has been widely studied recently to theoretically assess the performance of different guidance laws and reveal the impact of the physical constraints on capture zones. In a recent study, the capture zones of the continuous and pulsed guidance laws in the pursuit-evasion game are analytically discussed to provide deep insights into the capturability distinction between the continuous guidance law and the pulsed guidance law.

Moving mesh adaptation provides optimal resource allocation to computational fluid dynamics for the capture of different key physical features, i.e., high-resolution flow field solutions on low-resolution meshes. Although many moving mesh methods are available, they require artificial experience as well as computation of a posteriori information about the flow field, which poses a significant challenge for practical applications. Para2Mesh uses a double-diffusion framework to accomplish accurate flow field reconstruction through iterative denoising to provide flow field features as supervised information for fast and reliable mesh movement, thus enabling adaptive mesh prediction from design parameters.

Aircraft safety faces a critical challenge: “stall,” where wings lose lift at high angles, risking crashes. Researchers from the Civil Aviation University of China have developed a bio-inspired solution—microscopic herringbone grooves mimicking bird feathers—that delays stalls by 28.57%. This passive, low-cost technology reduces flow separation on wings, outperforming traditional methods while minimizing drag.

A new study published in Chinese Journal of Aeronautics reveals critical insights into hypersonic boundary layer instabilities. Using resolvent analysis, parabolized stability equations and direct numerical simulation, researchers investigated disturbance growth on a blunt-tip wedge at Mach 5.9. The study identifies two competing wave patterns: Pattern A (slow amplification in the entropy layer) and Pattern B (rapid transient growth in the boundary layer). Key findings highlight the impact of nose radius, wall cooling, and acoustic wave receptivity, offering new control strategies for nonmodal instabilities. This work advances understanding of hypersonic flow stability with practical implications for aerospace design.

The rotating stall precursor is a major research focus in the field of aerodynamic compressor flow stability, as an accurate understanding of its physical mechanisms can help improve the operating margin of the compressor system in aircraft engines and ensure flight safety. With advances in numerical simulation techniques, the physical essence of spike-type stall has been increasingly investigated in depth. Many studies assume that weak-amplitude disturbances exist prior to stall and facilitate its onset; however, the specific nature of these disturbances, their relationship with the spontaneous unsteady behavior of the flow, and whether these disturbances serve as the origin of the spike-type stall, have yet to be clarified.

Isosbestic behavior is a term used in spectroscopy, or the study of light and electromagnetic spectra, and references the specific wavelength in which the complete absorption of a solution is constant throughout the reaction, leading to a stable rate of absorbance throughout the entirety of the reaction. This type of behavior is typically viewed as an indicator that a chemical reaction has happened and the starting materials (reactants) have changed into the end materials (product) without any intermediates in between. However, researchers have found that this isn’t necessarily the case by using magic size clusters (MSCs) and precursors to reveal a relatively transparent intermediate involved in the reaction. 

Lead-free antiferroelectric materials hold promise as alternatives to lead-containing dielectrics, but the challenge of irreversible room-temperature phase transitions in sodium niobate (NaNbO₃) has hindered their application. This work innovatively employs a tin (Sn) and cerium (Ce) co-doping strategy, successfully achieving precise control over the phase structure of NaNbO₃. The study found that the sample with x=0.04 exhibits reversible electric-field-induced ferroelectric/antiferroelectric (AFE ⇄ FE) phase transitions at room temperature, displaying the characteristic double hysteresis loops and a positive strain of 0.38%. The team also clarified the key mechanism involving Sn²⁺/Ce³⁺ occupying A-sites and Sn⁴⁺/Ce⁴⁺ occupying B-sites through atmosphere-controlled sintering. This work paves a new avenue for the design and application of high-performance lead-free antiferroelectric materials.