Chemist Helps Bolster Army’s Detection Of Emerging Threats

U.S. Army scientists are researching improved technology to detect chemical hazards to ensure the safety of soldiers against emerging threats.  Rod Fry, a chemist with the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, is helping to lead the effort for RDECOM’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center.

Video provided by U.S. Army RDECOM YouTube channel

Protecting Soldiers In Extreme Environments

At the U.S. Army Research Laboratory scientists and engineers have been studying how they can make higher performance materials for soldiers at lighter weights.

Army researchers want to enhance soldiers’ battlefield effectiveness without placing an extra load on their backs.

The challenge has led to the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, or ARL, Enterprise for Multiscale Research of Materials, made up of in-house research and most recently, two cooperative agreements awarded in April.

Researchers will develop materials to protect soldiers in extreme dynamic environments; and create energy efficient devices and batteries.

Johns Hopkins University will lead the materials in extreme environments collaboration. The research lab has invested up to $90 million over 10 years for a five-year initial study that could be renewed for an additional five years. Among the major partner institutions are the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the University of Delaware and Rutgers University.

University of Utah will head ARL’s multiscale modeling research. The research lab has awarded up to $20.9 million toward the lighter-weight materials program.

A number of institutions will work towards multiscale modeling: Boston University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Pennsylvania State University, Harvard University, Brown University, the University of California (Davis), and the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy.

The goal is to bring together experts from government, academia and industry to overcome daunting obstacles to develop new materials.

“It’s a big deal,” said John Beatty, the Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments collaborative alliance manager, who is part of the Weapons & Materials Research Directorate, ARL. “We will make significant advances in designing materials, but our focus with this enterprise is as much about changing the way people think about designing as it is anything else.”

Right now ARL researchers have some understanding of the mechanical properties of materials and some understanding of the electronic properties, but over time we want to blend the knowledge, said John Pellegrino, acting director of ARL, who was formerly the director of the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate, overseeing the Enterprise for Multiscale Materials Research.

“It is very ambitious to say we will be able to come up with a set of models that can fully describe materials’ behavior,” Pellegrino said. “But we are hopeful we will be able to model materials well enough that we can begin to design materials using the models, and predict how they will behave. This would give us insight into a whole new class of material capabilities.”

In conjunction with ARL, the consortium will lead to a more comprehensive study of materials in the future even though each one is technically independent of the other, Pellegrino said.

The extreme dynamic environments study will be based from the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, or HEMI, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which has been years in the making.

The institute will focus on the behavior of materials and systems under extreme conditions, said K.T. Ramesh, the Alonzo G. Decker, Jr. Professor of Science & Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, founding director of HEMI and a professor of mechanical engineering.

“We are interested in impact and such extreme events from a very broad perspective –including high pressure and high-strain rates,” Ramesh explained.

The science is fundamentally close enough to address a range of related problems, like homeland security, asteroid impact and nuclear threats.

“What affects the material is the huge amount of energy landing all at once,” Ramesh said. “You can’t develop a new protective material until you can understand what happens to it in extreme environments.”

Ramesh wants the joint university-ARL team to both understand fundamental mechanisms and be able to articulate the findings to anyone coming on board.

“That is one of the measures of success,” he said.

Each of the partner institutions involved in the extreme dynamic environments research brings a unique perspective that combines for a multidisciplinary approach to solving the problem.

For instance, Caltech will use a range of tools they have developed over 20 years to accurately model the behavior of materials from the subatomic level all the way to the scale of bulk materials.

“Right now we don’t have a predictive model for designing advanced materials,” said Kaushik Bhattacharya, Caltech’s lead and the Howell N. Tyson Sr., Professor of Mechanics and professor of materials science. “We have some theories that guide us, but they really are not fully predictive.”

Scientists have to understand the complete hierarchy of the advanced materials and how all of the pieces fit together, then how the levels of hierarchy change during a high-velocity impact, Bhattacharya said.

“We hope to increase the speed of development as well as the strength of materials through such rigorous analysis,” he said.

The undertaking may seem huge considering the time frame for incorporating new classes of materials into applications now can take as much as 20 years from initial research to first use.

There are many risks associated with finding a material that serves the function you need. One major challenge is even if you succeed, it often doesn’t diminish the cost of similar research going forward, said Pellegrino.

“Another challenge is that the complexity of materials has grown,” explained Pellegrino. “Edisonian-approach research has given us spectacular results in the past. We have gotten better armor than before, different electron devices, including batteries, than we have ever had. All of that is great, but what we need now is far more complex than we have ever needed.”

Soldiers are carrying up to 32 pounds of batteries to power their technological devices in the field these days.

This is one of the concerns that the University of Utah-led consortium will address.

“We want to help the Army make advances in fundamental research that will lead to better materials to help our soldiers in the field,” says computing Professor Martin Berzins, principal investigator from the University of Utah.

Besides batteries, partners, such as Boston University, along with others, will look closely at developing new approaches for designing smaller and more efficient electromagnetic devices that meet military needs.

The design simulation research is based on a five-year plan that could be extended for an additional five years if it is successful.

“What we are looking for is a materials-by-design capability that is done by validated modeling from the smallest to the largest relevant scale,” said Meredith Reed, collaborative alliance manager for the consortium, and member of the Sensors & Electron Devices Directorate at ARL. “We want better control and prediction of transport phenomena in order to get the desired properties to develop new Army technologies.”

The focus of the program is well-aligned with the White House Materials Genomes Initiative, or MGI, that has been underway for about a year to drastically increase advanced materials design, Reed said.

A White House blog posted May 14 mentioned that achieving the MGI vision demands an “all hands on deck” approach, with dedicated involvement from academic institutions, industry, professional societies, as well as government.

“The MGI white paper talks about creating an ecosystem where manufacturing and development come together and are more streamlined so that discoveries might not have to take 20 years to make it to market,” Pellegrino said. “Having that ecosystem increases the chance of collaboration not only in military-specific problems, but the scientific understanding of advanced materials design will grow that much faster across the board.”

For more information about the Enterprise for Multiscale Research of Materials, visit the White House website.

By Joyce P. Brayboy, U.S. Army Research Laboratory

 From www.army.mil

R.O.U.S. – Rodents Of Unusual Skills

Problem?  Send in the R.O.U.S.s!  No, not the ones from the Fire Swamp.

A rat may never be man’s best friend, but the Rugged Automated Training System research sponsored by scientists with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, in collaboration with engineers at West Point and the Counter Explosives Hazards Center, will determine if and how these animals can be trained to save soldiers’ lives.

In July, Barron Associates Inc., Charlottesville, Va. was selected for an award under the Small Business Technology Transfer, or STTR, program to develop and test a rugged, automated and low-cost system for training rats to detect improvised explosive devices and mines, said Micheline Strand, chief of the Army Research Office‘s Life Sciences Division, which manages the program.

“The automated system we’re developing is designed to inexpensively train rats to detect buried explosives to solve an immediate Army need for safer and lower-cost mine removal,” said William Gressick, senior research engineer and the project’s principal investigator at Barron Associates. “Beyond this application, the system will facilitate the use of rats in other search tasks such as homeland security and search-and-rescue operations. In the long-term, the system is likely to benefit both official and humanitarian organizations.”

“If we can demonstrate that rats can be trained inexpensively to be reliable detectors, then this method would not only lower costs for the Army but would also create new opportunities for using animals to detect anything from mines to humans buried in earthquake rubble,” Strand said.

It is well established that animals are capable of identifying explosives at lower concentrations than abiotic systems. The Department of Defense currently relies on dogs as the animal of choice for explosives detection. The goal of this STTR program is not to replace the use of dogs, but to expand the Army’s detection capabilities.

“Training dogs is very expensive. If we can significantly reduce the cost of a trained animal, then we could provide more animals to protect soldiers.” Strand explained.

Trained rats would also create new opportunities; rats can search smaller spaces than a dog can, and are easier to transport.

Landmines kill between 15,000 and 20,000 people a year, and continue to kill adults and children decades after a conflict ends. An automated system to train rats to find mines could accelerate worldwide efforts to clear mined areas and return mined land to farming or other productive uses.

ABOUT U.S. ARMY RESEARCH LABORATORY:

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory of the U.S. Army Research Development and Engineering Command is the Army’s corporate laboratory. For more information, visit www.arl.army.mil, there you can link to the ARL Facebook page or Inside the Lab, the ARL News Channel on You Tube.

By U.S. Army Research Laboratory Public Affairs

 From www.army.mil 

Working On Full Charge

We all know the routine.

You buy the battery pack of 150 thinking you’ll never need another battery ever again!  Then three months later you’re cursing the universe because your XBOX 360 remote needs two batteries and the only one you’ve managed to find is a suspicious-looking, partially gnawed AA you found under the couch.

And let us not even get into the arduous process of actually having to dispose of them.

And sure, you could make the argument that rechargeable batteries are the more responsible way to go, but I find that I have trust issues when it comes to those things.  The more they get used, the less useful they seem to be.

Ah, but fear not, battery-users!  Scientists from the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) are working to improve the life and power of batteries.  How are they doing that?  It all comes down to the science of energy.

ARL researchers have developed a substance that increases the life of a battery by 30% without increasing the weight.  The new technology deals with the electrolyte part of lithium-ion batteries.  By modifying the liquid electrolytes, the battery is able to tolerate higher voltages.

So why are they doing this?  Well, the Army wants to increase the cell voltage of lithium ion batteries, but still maintain their reliability.  Get the best of both worlds, so to speak.  Sounds too good to be true?

Surprisingly, it isn’t.

“The idea is with higher voltage batteries we can increase the energy density, which means that the soldiers can carry less weight into the field, but still have the same amount of energy carrying with them,” said Dr. Arthur Von Cresce, materials scientist with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.  Cresce is a part of the team that helped develop the substance that helped improve the electrolyte performance in batteries.

And that’s no small feat.

“Electrolytes are a very vulnerable component to the battery,” Dr. Cresce explains.  “We are modifying the electrolytes so we can tolerate higher voltages.  Through that, we accomplish the goal of higher energy density.”

This is a holistic approach to restructuring the way a battery works that goes beyond the military.  Battery use is an everyday part of our lives.  There’s a movement in the military to “go green”– and lithium batteries would be “definitely the way to go” with that, according to Dr. Cresce.

However, lithium batteries do have certain problems.  They don’t work well at low temperatures, and they’re heavy.  If you buy a hybrid car, that thing has a 600 pound battery pack.  Changing the weight of batteries, and eventually how they work, could make a world of difference (pun intended, of course).

Making this a reality across the global board is more than just tweaking a little piece here or improving an electrolyte there, it’s a team effort.  And by that I mean when it comes to batteries, all the components work in unison.  That means they have to be engineered together.

“We work as a team.  I’m working with Kang Xu [a scientist at the Army Research Laboratory] on the liquid electrolytes.  But we work together with other departments and specialists.  We all advance, but we only advance together,” said Dr. Cresce.

The environmental impact of these batteries remains the same as it would for its lesser efficient counterparts, but having a more efficient and lighter battery on the battlefield could actually improve the life and health of service members.

“It’s my understanding that soldiers have to carry between 16-30 pounds of batteries, and that’s because they have a lot of different battery operated devices, like a GPS, communicator, laser sight, night vision, etc.   If we increase the energy density, we can reduce the amount of weight that they carry,” Cresce says.

Researchers estimate that they could reduce the payload carry of a service member by about ten pounds, and if anyone’s carted around 80-90 lbs of weight in blistering heat and scorching desert, ten pounds off could make a big difference.

“It’s a big deal to take some weight off their backs,” Cresce adds.  “We’re trying to shrink the overall bulk size of batteries [as well], while maintaining safety and reliability.  Reliability is the big one for us.  These guys are using these in abusive conditions.”

Right now, they’re limited in the shapes of sizes of cells, but Cresce is hopeful for the future.  “In the future I see really small or conformal, even flexible batteries.”

As amazing as this all is, I still find myself skeptical when the words “rechargeable” are coupled with the word “battery”.

I thought you said you would be there for me! *sob*

Dr. Cresce is no stranger to my hesitancy.   “We all suffer from this.  As our laptops and cell phones age, the batteries hold less charge.  So typically the soldiers don’t trust these batteries.  What we’re finding is with our modifications, the batteries can have more cycles at a higher voltage.  They retain their charge. If they’re left alone, if they’re charged many times, they’re still reliable.”

And the conceptual energy-efficient ideas don’t stop with the battery.

“ARL does a lot of fundamental research, so a lot of these issues of finding fuel wherever you can or using these very simple systems comes down to what kind of fundamentals and materials you understand, and we’re very good at that here,” he says.

Some of this sustainable energy technology is already being implemented in the field with the warfighter.  There are blanket solar cells and portable solar cells currently being used on posts and bases in Afghanistan, and the ARL is looking into developing fuel cell electric generation technology that could revolutionize the way the military harnesses energy in the future.

When it comes down to it, this goes way beyond having a more convenient battery for video games controllers or equipment in the field.  This kind of science could shape the future of energy-efficiency.

“I think it’s kind of interesting that we [the Army] have the chance to affect the world and the science of batteries.  We’re really at the cutting edge of lithium ion and fuel cell and solar research,” Dr. Cresce said with an upbeat lift in his tone.  “This is a really cool place to be.”

———- Information for this blog post provided by the Army Research Laboratory

Armed with Science — Protected Too!

Dr. Reuben H. Kraft is an expert on neurotrauma biomechanics at the Army Research Lab. He is the recipient of the 2010 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for his research in computational mechanics.

If neuroscience appeals to you, you should consider Forensic Science careers and make a difference in law enforcement using science!

Soldiers often find themselves exposed to extreme environments and threats. I view Warfighters as “ultra athletes” that require the best protection that science can offer. From a fundamental science perspective, understanding how the human body responds in extreme environments is a multidisciplinary topic where there is much to learn. For the military extreme environment there exists a fundamental link between understanding injury mechanisms, such as bone fracture or ligament tearing, to developing Soldier protection. My research is focused on understanding injury mechanisms and developing advanced computational approaches for modeling the human body response in extreme environments so that unrivaled Solider protection is enabled. The most intriguing part of this research is the cross-cutting relationships between many different disciplines: mechanics, computer science, materials, network science and neuroscience. Together, these create a detailed picture of the biomechanics and injury mechanisms that occur in humans at high rates of loading – in some cases hundreds of times greater than a civilian car accident.

In one of my research areas, my group uses advanced numerical modeling techniques to develop high-resolution anatomically accurate models of the human brain to understand trauma. At the end of the day, these models will help design the next generation of head protection against blast, blunt impact and ballistic threats – and at the same time be comfortable for the Soldier.  In this effort, we apply my background in computational mechanics and multi-scale modeling to simulate diffuse axonal injury, an important injury mechanism associated with brain trauma. This research has led my group into new areas of scientific research, including a new method of combining finite element and connectome-based approaches to evaluate time-evolving changes in brain structure.  But we don’t stop there. Using this information, my group has been working with ARL’s Translational Neuroscience group to attempt to understand what this may mean for the Soldiers cognitive state. In other words, if we can model the biomechanical structural damage, what effect does that damage have on the functional brain outcomes and cognition? You might call this the “so-what” question.

In addition to brain trauma research, my group has also been conducting research in the area of blast-induced lower extremity injury – a major concern to the Warfighter today due to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) buried in the ground. IEDs are detonated underneath our vehicles leading the so-called underbody blast problem. Using Army super computers for massively parallel simulations, we have shown that we can capture various types of injuries such as transverse closed bone fractures and comminuted bone failure. We have been exploring how various injury mechanisms change and transition as the loading conditions change. This research is already pointing towards new concepts for Soldier protection. Specifically, inspired from computed bone failure patterns in the lower extremities during an underbody blast event, multiple novel protection strategies have been identified such as cancaneal crush protection, rapid extremity confinement and energy shift guidance.

As my group continues to push the science to improve these predictive capabilities, many new protection technologies will emerge ultimately providing unparalleled protection for our Warfighters.

About the Author:

Dr. Reuben H. Kraft has provided significant leadership and vision for ARL’s research in computational high-rate injury biomechanics for soldier protection. He is a 2011 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers for his research in computational mechanics. His work in multi-scale modeling techniques applied to armor materials and high-rate injury biomechanics is contributing to the protection of U.S. Soldiers and its allies. Invited by the U.S. Medical Research and Materiel Command to serve on the Department of Defense Computational Brain Injury Modeling Expert Panel, he provides critical leadership for steering basic and applied biomedical research. As Principle Investigator of the ARL Computational Injury Biomechanics Laboratory, Dr. Kraft helps pave the way for new biomechanics modeling approaches across the Department of Defense. As an expert on neurotrauma biomechanics, he serves as one of four group leaders for a Department of Defense Integrated Research Team that spans across the Army, Navy, and Air Force for developing a deployable diagnostic device for mild traumatic brain injury.