Study On Laser And Infrared Attenuation Performance Of Carbon Nanotubes

In recent years, the weapon systems of laser and infrared (IR) imaging guidance have been widely used in modern warfare because of their high precision and strong anti-interference. However, military smoke, a rapid and effective passive jamming method, can effectively counteract the attack of precision-guided weapons by their scattering and absorbing effects. The traditional smoke has good visible light (0.4-0.76 mu m) obscurant performance, but hardly any effects to other electromagnetic wave bands while the weapon systems of laser and IR imaging guidance usually work in broad band, including the near-infrared (1-3 mu m), middle-infrared (3-5 mu m), far-infrared (8-14 mu m), and so on. Accordingly, exploiting new effective obscurant materials has attracted tremendous interest worldwide nowadays. As is known, the nano-structured materials have lots of unique properties comparing with the traditional materials suggesting that they might be the perfect alternatives to solve the problems above.Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are well-ordered, all-carbon hollow graphitic nano-structured materials with a high aspect ratio, lengths from several hundred nanometers to several millimeters. CNTs possess many unique intrinsic physical-chemical properties and are investigated in many areas reported by the previous studies. However, no application research about CNTs in smoke technology field is reported yet. In this paper, the attenuation performances of CNTs smoke to laser and IR were assessed in 20m(3) smoke chamber. The testing wavebands employed in experiments are 1.06 mu m and 10.6 mu m laser, 3-5 mu m and 8-14 mu m IR radiation. The main parameters were obtained included the attenuation rate, transmission rate, mass extinction coefficient, etc. The experimental results suggest that CNTs smoke exhibits excellent attenuation ability to the broadband IR radiation. Their mass extinction coefficients are all above 1m(2).g(-1). Nevertheless, the mass extinction coefficients vary with the sampling time and smoke particles concentrations, even in the same testing waveband. With the time going the mass extinction coefficients will increase gradually. Based on the above results, theoretical calculations are also carried out for further exploitations. In general, CNTs smoke behaves excellent attenuation ability toward laser and IR under the experimental conditions. Therefore, they have great potentials to develop new smoke obscurant materials which could effectively interfere with broadband IR radiation including 1.06 mu m, 10.6 mu m, 3-5 mu m and 8-12 mu m IR waveband.