Manfred Held
Damage of vehicles caused by anti-tank mines is mostly credited to the transferred shock waves. The author subdivides the blast load into a close-field effect with the bulge in the belly plate and the global effect which accelerates the total vehicle with enormous force (magnitudes) and leads to damage on separated masses. These results are based on the described tests concerning the bulging acceleration in small scaled distances and the measured global impulses of mines lying on the ground, level to the ground, and buried 100 mm deep. The magnitudes of loads exerted by the shock waves and by the acceleration are discussed in detail.
Michael T. Rigby
In the first quarter of 2008 QinetiQ Novare completed three months of intensive testing and analysis on behalf of the Commonwealth of Australia (CoA) in order to deliver recommendations for the lifing of explosive ordnance (EO) items deployed to the Middle East Area of Operation (MEAO). The study and associated detailed analysis of over 200 items of EO delivered on average a 400% increase over current deployed lives. In some instances QinetiQ Novare was able to substantiate increases greater than 700% than the extant lives promulgated by the Australian Defence Force (ADF) for some items of EO in the MEAO. The range of EO items studied under this task included a variety of 5.56-mm, 9-mm, and .50 cal small arms ammunition natures, 25-mm MP-T and HEI-T, a selection of aircraft countermeasures, aircraft flares and hand employed flares, various signal kits, lethal and non-lethal 40-mm natures, 66-mm rockets, and the 84-mm Carl Gustav family of weapons. As a direct result of the program, it is anticipated that the CoA will have the opportunity to realise savings in the order of tens of millions of dollars per annum (for each year the ADF remains operationally deployed in a MEAO-like environment) across the operational and logistic supply chain whilst significantly increasing the ADF’s deployed operational capability.
Jean-Evrard Brunel and Benoit Gresle
The paper focuses on the design and testing of a frame-skin-junction (FSJ) battle-damage repair (BDR) for use on a helicopter fuselage. Two instances of the FSJ were examined: i) FSJ located at a region where the fuselage skin terminates, with compressive frame buckling being the critical failure mode, and ii) FSJ located at a continuous skin region of the fuselage, where load transfer is mainly through the fuselage skin. Test specimens representative of the two repair instances were manufactured, and ballistic firing used to incur critical damage to each. Bonded/riveted patches and riveted aluminium angles for skin and frame BDRs respectively were then applied, and structural testing used to verify the performance of the repairs in-situ. The results of the structural testing indicated that the BDR procedure could recover the strength of each specimen, whilst adhering to the BDR operational criteria of limited application time and application simplicity.
Michael Liu and Oliver Gruber
Next-generation Network Centric Warfare (NCW) [1] foresees naval platforms running unified Internet Protocol (IP) networks capable of running different applications on the same backbone. To promote this NCW concept, Thales Australia has proposed a digital ship local area network (LAN) architecture called the Ship Unified Network IP for Communications Ship (SUNI/CS). A small-scale prototype of this SUNI/CS network has been constructed in Thales Australia's Network Enabled Warfare Laboratory (NEWLab). To mitigate the technical risks of a large-scale deployable digital ship LAN, the network performance and capacity needs to be understood before deployment. Clearly it is impractical to build a full-scale digital ship LAN in a laboratory environment. To overcome this, modelling and simulation of network performance using a discrete event simulator such as OPNET is required. As the first step in modelling a large-scale deployable digital ship LAN, a benchmark study has been conducted to validate the OPNET models against real-life measurements on the SUNI/CS network. In this study, packet delay and throughput were simulated in OPNET and measured on SUNI/CS. A comparison of these results showed the simulated OPNET model accurately matched the measured SUNI/CS results. This study paved the way for future efforts in network capacity and performance measurement on a real-scale digital ship LAN OPNET model.
Anil Kumar Maini and Varsha Agrawal
Precision-guided munitions (PGM) including laser-guided bombs (LGB), projectiles and missiles and IR guided air-to-air (AAM) and surface-to-air missiles (SAM) are widely exploited weapons because of their precision strike capability. The efficacy of the mission involving delivery of laser-guided munitions largely depends upon the envelope of weapon release from the launch platform and the functionality status of the weapon at the time of release. Laser-guided munitions make use of laser radiation scattered by the target after it is illuminated by a laser target designator. The laser target designator and the laser seeker used in the guided weapon use the same PRF code in a given mission and the weapon homes on to the source of laser scatter once a PRF code is matched. PRF code compatibility between the designator and the laser seeker therefore is essential to the weapon’s functionality and mission success. Though periodic functionality or readiness checks on this class of guided weapons may involve checking field-of-view, linearity and sensitivity in addition to PRF code compatibility; it is the PRF code compatibility check that is considered as the litmus test for establishing the serviceability of the weapon. This paper presents the design and development of a portable electro-optic device that generates the signatures in terms of amplitude, wavelength, and PRF code of the laser radiation scattered from the target as seen by the laser seeker used in LGB delivery applications. The device was used to perform serviceability checks on laser seekers of foreign origin.
Clive M. Alabaster, Francesco Soldani, and James W. Hyde
The study of radar target transfer function (TTF) is relevant to both automatic target recognition using range profiling methods and the optimisation of detection performance by exploiting matched waveform techniques. However, range profiles, and their associated TTFs, are known to be highly sensitive to target geometry and aspect angle. This paper demonstrates that TTFs and their associated range profiles both decorrelate within 1° variation in aspect angle and that such rapid decorrelation is dominated by scintillation effects rather than the migration through range cell phenomenon. However, TTFs may offer advantages over range profiling since the former are typically characterised by many more data points than the latter. This leads to increased separability of different target classes and generally lower correlation statistics when using TTFs. TTFs are also important in the design of matched radar waveforms. A combination of experimental results using scaled model targets and simulation is presented which demonstrate that under ideal conditions matched waveforms can improve the signal to clutter ratio by up to 30 dB.
