Eicc p161 smart materials for military applications

EICC- P161 Smart Materials for Military Application

1

“National Conference on Emerging Trends in Intelligent Computing and Communication (EICC-2012)”, on April 13-14, 2012 at Galgotias College of Engineering & Technology, Greater Noida, U. P.

Smart Materials for Military Applications

Anupam Tiwari IETE –N Delhi

[email protected]

Abstract—“Smart Materials” means incorporating intelligence into materials, so that they behave intelligently desired. There are various technologies which are building block of smart and intelligent systems. Nanotechnology (NT), Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), soft computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are components of smart materials. Smart materials have many military applications, like they enhance existing war machines capabilities and miniaturization of aircraft [1]. Smart combat suit, smart cloths and smart sensors are also few examples which have military applications. In Net-centric warfare scenario “Smart Dust” (Mote) can be used as distributed wireless sensors. Motes as an important element of sensor network are discussed in this paper. Canopy shield of fighter aircraft can be improved by Nanotechnology, which can shield EM Waves. Modernization of survival pack with smart enable items is also suggested.

Keywords- NT, ANN, CNT, MAV, Dust Mote and AI

Smart materials are materials having intrinsic and extrinsic capabilities. They first respond to stimuli and environmental changes and secondly activate their functions according to these changes. The stimuli could originate internally or externally.

Smart materials have more properties that can be significantly changed by external stimuli such as stress, temperature pH, electric or magnetic fields. Few examples of smart materials like, Shape memory alloys, Piezoelectric materials, Electro-rheostatic materials, Magneto- rheostatic materials, Smart Gels, Sensitive polymers (temperature-responsive polymer), Micro air vehicles (MAVs) and Smart Dust.

I. SMART COMBAT SUIT

A. Body Armor NT enhances capability of combat suit. Carbon Nano

Tube (CNT) has very high tensile strength (11000-63000 M Pa) as compared to steel which has only 860 M Pa. It is light and strong so it’s ideal for body armor.

B. Nuclear Biological and Chemical (NBC) detector NBC threat can be monitor by NT enable sensors, they

change colour indications, and detect NBC threat. Wearable electronics fitted on combat suit can communicate with Net-centric communication room. Troops get updates from PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) or wearable computers for better situational awareness and react as per war scenario.

Figure 1: Smart Combat Suit

With the advancement of nanotechnology, chemically-protective combat suit can be fabricated which shield soldiers against hazardous chemicals and deadly micro-organisms. “Electronic nose” consist of ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks), trained by different chemical agents can detect fumes of chemical weapons and warn soldiers about chemical attack and take suitable precautions.

II. SMART INSECT (MICRO AIR VEHICLES)

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) is a small air vehicle [3] as shown in Figure-3, can be used for intelligence gathering. An MAV has generally been defined as having a span of less than 6 inches, and a mass of less than 100 grams. They are so small in length and penetrate anywhere without detection. MAVs can be deployed at combat zone to monitor troop’s movement, NBC threats and battle damage assessment.

Nano Air Vehicles (NAVs) aims at an extremely small (less than 7.5 cm wing span); ultra-lightweight (less than 10 grams) air vehicle system, designed for indoor, outdoor urban and military missions. NAVs/ MAVs are impossible to spot due to their small size, which makes them perfect for military applications.

Figure 3: MAV/NAV


2


III. SMART CLOTHS

“Smart cloths” are combination of mobile multimedia, wireless communication and wearable computing [4]. They offer potential to make personal computers even more personal. Soldiers can wear a T-shirt (Figure-4) made of special tactile material which can detect variety of signals from the human body, such as detection wounds. The T-shirt functions like a computer, with optical and conductive fibres integrated into the garment. It can monitor the vital signs such as heart rate and breathing of the wearers like security and military personnel [5]. It can then generate signal which indicates nature of injury, analyze their extent, decide on the urgency to react, and even takes some action to stabilize the injury.

Figure 4: Smart T-Shirt

IV. SMART DUST (MOTE)

It is a nano-structured silicon senor which can spontaneously assemble, orient sense and report on their local

environment, which can be used in a various applications. Main purpose is to collect and relay information (up to 1 Km) where base station is installed. Dust motes use wireless communication to relay information to a base station over distances of 10 m to1000 m.

A dust mote is an autonomous node incorporating sensor,

computing, communications and power source in an mm3

volume. Basic mote consists of a microcontroller with sensors and communication unit. The communication unit consists of RF transceiver, a laser module, and a corner cube reflector. Devices can have sensors to monitor temperature, light, humidity, pressure, 3 axis magnetometers, and 3 axis accelerometers.

A collection of dust motes are dispersed in area to monitor.

Figure 2: Mote

Motes create a wireless network. They are dispersed by UAV across a battle space, like (food packets) yielding real-time information about enemy or troops movements, remote metrological observations and tactical environment [6], [7]. They use wireless peer-to-peer communication to form a self-organized network. Multi-hop routing algorithms based on dynamic network and resource discovery protocol is used for communicating from remote mote to base station. Motes have less computational ability so they use symmetric cryptography for secure communication. Steps for secure key loading are as follows:-

Initial loading of keys in all motes before

deployment. Each node bootstraps itself by broadcasting an initial

key in the clear. Nodes then exchange keys and build up trust

structures as they do network and resource discovery. Table-1, summarise protocols, OS, hardware and

management protocols in typical mote communication [8].


3


TABLE-1 PROTOCOLS, MANAGEMENT , HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE OF MOTE COMMUNICATION.

Figure 5

Figure-5 shows sensor networks layers. Physical, data link, network, transport and application layer stack with power, task and mobility management planes. Management planes is implemented with software and hardware.

V. SMART MATERIALS AIR FORCE APPLICATION

A. Shielding of EM Wave

Electromagnetic (EM) discharge shielding is required in the cockpit of fighter plane for avoiding interference with electronic systems and also adverse effect on health of pilot. Carbon Nano Tube (CNT) coating on cockpit cover is good for EM shielding and electrostatic discharge.

B. Servival Kit Survival kit is an essential part of ejection seat in fighter

plane. It carries essential items for survival of a pilot in military aircraft in case of ejection. It contains items like (knife, water purifier tablets, high calories food, and pistol). It is proposed to modernize the contents of kit with following:-,

Nano enabled high calories eatables, Nano bandage,

Nano medicine (nano-bio fusion), Nano water purifier, and nano-sensor (as RFID tag) war tag which will carry his service number and religion.

PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) which will communicate with Net centric warfare control room.

Pistol, knife and high quality touch with NT enable light weight battery.

VI. HEALTH AND ENVIORNMENTAL ISSUES

NT and Smart materials, health hazards and environmental issues still need research. These materials are non disposable, so it also adversely effects environment. Pollution issues, ingress of these materials inside human body via mouth or skin. Disposal and health hazards of these smart materials need extensive studies.

Error code correction Reed-Solomon ECC is one of the best.

Reliable Datagram Protocol (RDP)

It allows base stations to communicate with motes reliably.

Security(cryptography) Symmetrical keys.

Operating System(OS) Tiny OS in this processor, which has 3500 bytes OS code space and 4500 bytes available code space.

Mobility support to Motes protocol

Bootstrap Protocol (BOOTP) allows motes to register with any base station in the world.

Typical Hardware of mote

8535 micro-controller with 8 KB instruction flash memory, 512 bytes RAM and 512 bytes EEPROM. Processor, 3 KB RAM One week fully active, 2 year @1 % duty cycle and power source.

Power management plane This plane manages power management of sensor node. The sensor node may turn off its receiver after receiving a message from one of its neighbours. It avoids duplicated messages. Also, when low power level then the sensor node broadcasts to its neighbours that it is low in power & can’t participate in routing messages. Remaining power is reserved for sensing, Figure -5.

Mobility management

Plane This plane detects and registers the movement of sensor nodes, so a route back to the user is always maintained, and the sensor nodes can keep track of who are their neighbour sensor nodes. By knowing who the neighbour sensor nodes are, the sensor nodes can balance their power and task usage (Figure -5).

Task management plane This plane balances and schedules the sensing tasks given to a specific region, Figure -5.

Application layer protocol

Sensor management protocol (SMP), task assignment and data advertisement protocol (TADAP), and sensor query and data dissemination protocol (SQDDP)


4


VII. CONCLUSION

In the paper applications of smart materials in military field are discussed. Smart materials are intelligent. NT, AI and soft computing are most important components of “Smart materials”.

MAVs/NAVs will be use as sensors for warfare. Smart combat suits and smart cloths enhance solider capabilities and improve situational awareness. “Motes” are smart sensors which can be used as wireless distributed sensors network for military communication.

Smart materials are designed to reduce weight, eliminate sound, reflect more light, strength and handle more heat. Smart structures and systems enhance quality of life of a soldier.

In future, development of the high- tech textiles, battle uniform can be hardened into an instant shield with the push of a button. There can be chameleon-like battle suits that can change their colour depending on the surroundings and camouflage. If a combat soldier is hit in the leg, sensors relay information about his injury and location to the field headquarters. Sensors inform the field headquarters about the soldier who is the closest to the wounded soldier; new orders and the target's position appear on the rescuer's head-up display for better situational awareness.

MAVs/ NAVs will be extensive sensors in war scenario for unmanned and undetected missions. Smart Dust as an autonomous sensor will be the important of wireless distributed network.

Deployment of motes, communication security, protocols and management of motes are open research areas. Extensive R&D is required to study the side effect of Smart Materials and NT products.

VIII. REFERENCE [1] Georges Akhras, Canadian Military Journal, page 25-31 G Autumn 2000

[2] Joel M. Grasmeyer and Matthew T. Keennon, Development of the Black Widow Micro Air Vehicle. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

[3] McMichael, J.M., and Francis, M.S., Micro Air Vehicles – Toward a New Dimension in Flight, DARPA, USA, 1997.

[4] Steve Mann, communications of the ACM., August 1996/Vol. 39, No. 8.

[5] 0. Sahin, 0. Kayacan, E. Yazgan Bulgun , Smart Textiles for Soldier of the Future Defence Science Journal, Vol. 55, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 195-205 O 2005, DESIDOC

[6] Brett Warneke, Sunil Bhave, Smart Dust Mote Core Architecture

[7] Ross Anderson, Haowen Chan and Adrian Perrig, Key Infection: Smart Trust for Smart Dust. CS252, Spring 2000: Project Report Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center, 497 Cory Hall, Berkeley CA 94720.

[8] I.F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, and E. Cayirc, Wireless sensor networks: a survey, Computer Networks 38 (2002) 393–422.

IX. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anupam Tiwari is Member of IETE New Delhi. He has received B.E (Electrical), M Sc (Disaster Mitigation), IETE (E&TC) and M.Tech (Modeling & Simulation) in Applied Mathematics from DIAT – DU Pune. His main interest includes Mathematical Modeling and simulation, Fractals, Radar and Communication, Antenna and Networks.