In response to the needs of the UK MOD QinetiQ have designed, developed and trialled an ad-hoc, self organising network of acoustic nodes for in-depth deployment that can detect and track military targets in a range of environments and for all types of weapon locating. Research conducted has shown that disposable technologies are sufficiently mature to provide a useful military capability. Work this year has included a 3 month series of trials to exercise the prototype equipment and has provided an indication of in-service capability across a broad range of environments. This paper will discuss the scientific approach that was applied to the development of the equipment, from early laboratory development through to the prototype sensor network deployment in operationally representative environments. Highlights from the trials have been provided. New findings from the fusion of a low cost thermal imager that can be cued by the acoustic network are also discussed.
Currently, there are no simple sensing techniques for determining in real-time both the severity and location of structural damage in a composite caused by a dynamic impact event. Materials are known which emit light when they are fractured. This fracture-induced light emissions is known as triboluminescence. A triboluminescent material embedded in, or attached on, a composite structure could act as a real- time damage sensor. The occurrence and severity of the damage is given by the intensity of the resulting triboluminescent light. Since the triboluminescent light emission is fracture-initiated, no signal would be generated by a triboluminescent sensor until damage had actually occurred. Hence no false alarms are generated by this type of sensor. An array of triboluminescent sensors may allow real-time damage location monitoring simply by determining the wavelength of the emitted light. We have developed a series of highly efficient triboluminescent materials with sufficient thermal and chemical properties to allow doping into composites. We report a series of proof-of-principle experiments with these materials which strongly support the potential of triboluminescent sensors to monitor in real- time both the magnitude and location of structural damage.
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