High Mach precision guided aircraft has the important advantages of successful penetration with high level, presenting a strategic deterrent force to safeguard national core interests and maintain world peace. Its extremely high flight speed (>5 Ma) is an important guarantee of breakthrough capability, but causing severe aerodynamic erosion, heating, and ablation. Thus, it is a serious challenge to the communication, precise guidance, detonation and other combat tasks of the front-end antenna cover and antenna window. Therefore, the development of high-temperature transparent materials for antenna covers/windows that integrate various functions such as load-bearing, high-temperature resistance, and wave transmission is an urgent bottleneck problem to be solved.

High temperature resistance is an important indicator of transparent materials. The service speed of low-speed aircraft is low, and organic transparent materials such as phenolic resin and epoxy resin with lower temperature resistance can meet the usage requirements. With the continuous improvement of aircraft flight speed, higher temperature requirements are also expected for the use of transparent materials. The selection of transparent materials has transitioned from organic polymer systems to inorganic ceramic systems. Traditional inorganic transparent ceramics mainly include oxide ceramics such as quartz and glass-ceramics, with short-term usage temperatures around 1 000 ℃. With the development of aircraft flight speed towards high Mach numbers, there is a higher demand for the high-temperature resistance of transparent ceramic materials. Nitride ceramics, represented by silicon nitride (Si—N), boron nitride (B—N), silicon boron nitrogen (Si—B—N), and silicon nitrogen oxide (Si—N—O), exhibit superior high-temperature resistance than oxide ceramics. They are the most promising high-temperature transparent materials to meet the requirements of high Mach number aircraft and have become a research hotspot both domestically and internationally.

In recent years, researchers have conducted a detailed review of the research progress on nitride high-temperature transparent ceramic materials, which are a type of inorganic materials bonded by strong covalent bonds. They have the characteristics of high brittleness, high melting point and high hardness. Most nitride ceramics undergo obvious thermal decomposition reactions before melting, making it more difficult to sintering compared to carbide and boride ceramics. Typical sintering methods such as hot pressing or pressureless sintering have obvious shortcomings when preparing complex and precise structure antenna covers.

The precursor conversion method has the advantages of low processing temperature, controllable composition, easy processing and plasticity, and has become the preferred method for the preparation of high-performance antenna covers. The precursor conversion method first requires the synthesis of organic polymers containing target ceramic elements, which can be transformed into target ceramics after high-temperature (>1 000 ℃) pyrolysis. By utilizing the soluble and fusible properties of polymers, it is possible to prepare complex and precise antenna radomes through close prototyping.

At present, the development of new equipment is increasingly urgent for the precursor of nitride transparent ceramics, and the performance indicators of the precursor are also clearer. Driven by demand, systematic research has been carried out both domestically and internationally on the synthesis, transformation, and applications of nitride wave transmitting ceramic precursors. This not only provides rich material selection schemes for the development of high-temperature performance antenna covers, but also greatly enriches the development of precursor ceramics. This review mainly summarized the research progress in the precursor of nitride wave transmission ceramics in recent years, involving silicon nitride, boron nitride, silicon nitrogen oxide and other nitride wave transmission ceramic precursors, and proposes research directions in the future. It is expected that the work can provide certain reference for relevant researchers, and also look forward to more researchers paying attention to the research of nitride wave transmission precursors, supporting the development of wave transparent materials at high temperature.