Underwater, invisibility from sonar is as important as that from EM radiation on land, and metamaterials could play as important a role as they do in bending or disrupting the visible and invisible spectrums. "Approaching an enemy without being detected has been one of the key goals of military innovation since the adoption of camouflage." With the initial aim of identifying novel materials, products and technologies that exhibit signature reduction capabilities for the face and head regions of the body, SOCOM intends to test the resulting signature reduction improvement by a Probability of Detection performance metric at rest and in motion. It should not impede current signature reduction countermeasures built into combat uniforms and equipment or hamper the ability to breath, see or hear. SOCOM wants the solution to keep soldier identities secret in a variety of marine environments, all temperature and lighting conditions and in all weathers. Until the cloaking sun cream becomes reality, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is working on keeping the identity of commandos secret as they carry out covert missions through a recent solicitation for technology to reduce a person’s ‘facial signature’. Research at Imperial College London, UK, envisages the ultimate aim of making individual soldiers undetectable, perhaps through applying a metamaterial-enhanced ‘sun cream’ that would bend light round them. St Andrew’s University in the UK took this a step further towards a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak by rendering metamaterial into a flexible film that could enwrap an object while bending light around it. Research into using metamaterials to render objects invisible has attracted military attention from its inception, but although it has been ongoing for a number of years, no practical applications have yet been delivered.īack in 2008, the US Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation’s Nano-Scale Science and Engineering Centre funded research at the University of California aimed at developing materials that could make people and objects invisible by redirecting light and other EM radiation around them. "US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is working on keeping the identity of commandos secret as they carry out missions." Metamaterials are man-made materials with a microscopic structure which enables them to exhibit behaviour on the macro scale that cannot be found in natural materials. The pixels could also be easily sized up to conceal a warship or a building from distance, but in its current format would not be suitable for foot soldiers. BAE Systems’ engineers now plan to combine the pixels with other technologies to provide camouflage in other parts of the EM spectrum.īAE Systems trialled Adaptiv in mid-July 2011, demonstrating that it could make a BAE Systems CV90 armoured vehicle or other object effectively invisible when viewed in the infra-red spectrum.īAE Systems claims Adaptiv improves over previous similar cloaking devices as the panels can be made strong enough to improve the vehicle’s armour, plus the system consumes much less electricity than its rivals, especially when the vehicle is at rest in ‘stealth recce’ mode and generator output is low. It can also be used to display identification tags in the invisible spectrum to friendly troops, reducing the risk of friendly fire.Īdaptiv was partly funded by the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV), who wanted the system to initially focus on the infrared spectrum. As well as helping an object disappear into the background for an observer using an infrared sensor it can also be used to mimic the infrared reading of a different vehicle, so a tank looks like a civilian car, for example.
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