No abstract

Infrared smoke screen has been playing an important role in electro-optical countermeasures on the battlefield. Smoke transmittance is one of the most important parameters which can evaluate the obscuration performance of smoke. In this paper, an efficient numerical approach for field infrared smoke transmittance based on grayscale images is presented. Firstly, a field trial experimental setup is introduced. Then a grayscale smoke transmittance mathematical model is deduced and built. In addition, an image processing algorithm is used to extract the gray values of certain pixel points from grayscale images, and the positions of the selected points are discussed. Lastly, a field trial sample calculation is included to illustrate the procedure of the proposed method. The results prove to be of enough precision for engineering applications, and the method has greatly simplified the field trial process, thus improving efficiency.

Effective shielding area is a crucial indicator for the evaluation of the infrared smoke-obscuring effectiveness on the battlefield. The conventional methods for assessing the shielding area of the smoke screen are time-consuming and labor intensive, in addition to lacking precision. Therefore, an efficient and convincing technique for testing the effective shielding area of the smoke screen has great potential benefits in the smoke screen applications in the field trial. In this study, a thermal infrared sensor with a mid-wavelength infrared (MWIR) range of 3 to 5 μm was first used to capture the target scene images through clear as well as obscuring smoke, at regular intervals. The background subtraction in motion detection was then applied to obtain the contour of the smoke cloud at each frame. The smoke transmittance at each pixel within the smoke contour was interpolated based on the data that was collected from the image. Finally, the smoke effective shielding area was calculated, based on the accumulation of the effective shielding pixel points. One advantage of this approach is that it utilizes only one thermal infrared sensor without any other additional equipment in the field trial, which significantly contributes to the efficiency and its convenience. Experiments have been carried out to demonstrate that this approach can determine the effective shielding area of the field infrared smoke both practically and efficiently.

FeO@SiO@Ag ternary hybrid nanoparticles were synthesized via a facile seed-mediated growth route. X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy and vibrating sample magnetometer measurements were used to characterize the as-prepared product. The results indicated that the nanoparticles exhibited excellent magnetic properties and an extremely dense structure with Ag layer thicknesses of 30, 40, and 50 nm. Furthermore, the microwave shielding effectiveness exceeded 20 dB over almost the entire frequency range (2-18 GHz), and the effectiveness obviously improved as the thickness of the Ag layer increased. In addition, the IR extinction coefficient of the nanoparticles was calculated by a finite-difference time-domain method, which showed that the nanoparticles can inherit the extinction performance of pure silver when the Ag shell thickness was 30 nm. Specifically, after assembling into chains, the peak position of the IR extinction curves displayed a significant redshift and an intensity increase as the number of nanoparticles increased in the chain, which dramatically promoted the IR extinction capability. As a result, the FeO@SiO@Ag nanoparticles are expected to be used as a new multispectral interference material.

In order to study the infrared smoke interference performance in the field experiment, a set of infrared smoke testing system is introduced and discussed. The System works during the whole process of observation, from the smoke formation to its dissipation. According to the thermal image, the system could evaluate the interference performance of smoke screen to the target through computer calculation on Matlab program.