Ed. Note: The preeding article on the "Summary of CY 2008 CBR Contracts" is followed by the below article on what the DTRA and JSTO-CBD foresaw as their requirements in basic research for the CBR area through CY 2010. When these basic goals are met to whatever degree and then selected areas go through Applied Research to eventual production, ASA is sure that we will be documenting the research, development and engineering efforts as well as equipment that will begin to flow - worldwide.
What is needed and what may be next in CBR protection? What are the considerations?
The following topics are considered an extramural endeavor that combines the basic research needs of the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the Joint Science and Technology Office for Chemical and Biological Defense's (JSTO-CBD) to address the full spectrum of counter-WMD challenges. Both DTRA and JSTO-CBD share the mission to safeguard the US and its allies from WMD and provide capabilities to reduce, eliminate and counter the threat and effects from chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high yield explosives. Each seeks to identify, adopt, and adapt emerging and revolutionary sciences that may demonstrate high payoff potential to counter-WMD threats.
The below "Proposal Topics" are taken from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Broad Agency Announcement, HDTRA1-08-10-BRCWMD-Service Call.
Proposal Topics
To accomplish its basic research mission, DTRA's proposal topics are aligned with five major functional counter Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) research thrusts. These thrusts provide the context for creativity, imagination and discovery of fundamental principles, methods and approaches that ultimately lay the foundation for significant new capabilities to counter current and emerging threats from WMD.
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The DTRA Basic Research Thrust Areas
- Science of WMD Sensing and Recognition: The basic science of WMD sensing and recognition is the fundamental understanding of materials that demonstrate measurable changes when stimulated by energy, molecules, or particles from WMD in the environment. This research thrust involves exploration and exploitation of interactions between materials and various electromagnetic frequencies, molecules, nuclear radiation or particles. These interactions and the specific form of recognition they provide are used for subsequent generation of information that provides knowledge of the presence, identity, and/or quantity of material or energy in the environment that may be significant.
- Cognitive and Information Science: The basic science of cognitive and information science is the convergence of computer, information, mathematical, natural, and social science. This research thrust expands our understanding of social networks and advances knowledge of adversarial intent with respect to the acquisition, proliferation, and potential use of WMD. The methods may include analytical, computational or numerical, or experimental means to integrate knowledge across disciplines and improve rapid processing of intelligence and dissemination of information.
- Science for Protection: Basic science for protection involves advancing knowledge to protect life and life-sustaining resources and networks. Protection includes threat containment, decontamination, threat filtering, and shielding of systems. The concept is generalized to include fundamental investigations that reduce consequences of WMD, assist in the restoration of life-sustaining functions and support forensic science.
- Science to Defeat WMD: Basic science to defeat WMD involves furthering the understanding of explosives, their detonation and problems associated with accessing the target WMDs. This research thrust includes the creation of new energetic molecules/materials that enhance the defeat of WMDs, the improvement of modeling, and simulation of these materials and various phenomena that affect success and estimate the impact of defeat actions, and investigation of novel methods that may yield order-of-magnitude improvements in energy and energy release rate.
- Science to Secure WMD: Basic science to support securing WMD includes: (a) environmentally responsible innovative processes to neutralize chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive (CBRNE) materials and components; (b) discovery of revolutionary means to secure components and weapons; and (c) studies of scientific principles that lead to novel physical or other tags and methods to monitor compliance and disrupt proliferation pathways. The identification of basic phenomena that provide verifiable controls on materials and systems also helps arms control.
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DTRA Basic Research Topic Areas-Period 2
Topic A: Adversarial Motivation and Intent to Acquire, Proliferate, and Potentially Use WMD
(Thrust 2)
Background: Historically, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has pursued advances in the physical sciences and engineering to assist in the real-time and reliable detection, characterization, and analysis of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and related weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Many of these scientific advances have provided insight to analysts on adversarial capacity and activities (both technical and operational) that threaten the United States and its allies. ... Scientific investigations in adversarial motivation and intent to acquire, proliferate, and potentially use WMD are necessary to establish a comprehensive understanding of adversarial reasoning and probable subsequent behavior and actions. ... Building upon existing violence- and terrorist-related research, this topic hopes to reenergize studies of terrorist behaviors by uniting social science researchers with computational and mathematical scientists in a progressive study of counter-WMD issues that is critical to national security.
Impact: Research outcomes generated by this topic will advance systematic analyses of the conditions (psychological, organizational, and social) contributing to escalation of adversarial violence to potential use of WMD.
Objective: Terrorism usually results from multiple causal factors-not only psychological but also economic, political, religious, and sociological factors, among others. ...The study of adversarial reasoning can be delineated as a two phase process: intent recognition, and strategy formulation. The intent recognition phase focuses on the use of available information from observed actions to identify the nature of motivation and intent to use WMD, including probable identification of concealments and deceptions. After preliminary identification of motivation and intent, the strategy formulation phase focuses on the aggregation and evaluation of probable adversarial strategies and plans of action, including potential counteractions.
Topic B: Biological-Agent Dynamics in Turbulent Reacting Flows
(Thrust 4)
Background: DTRA is interested in biological-agent defeat weapons to deny enemy use of WMD facilities. It is critically important that collateral effects associated with the initiation of such weapons be eliminated or vastly reduced when compared to current technology. Therefore, novel weapon materials with both thermal and chemical/catalytic kill mechanisms are being investigated. Weapons effects that result from the utilization of such novel materials and the turbulences created by agent-and-gaseous-product mixing, is poorly understood and inaccurately modeled. There is a need to conduct basic research to understand underlying phenomena common to these weapons.
Little attention has been paid to developing fluid dynamic models for clumped units of bacillus spores in various turbulent flows, and bio-agent reactions in the temperature conditions and corrosive atmospheres following detonation. While mixing can be characterized on the macro scale (larger than the grid size), the micro scale (sub-grid size) still remains a challenge. Mixed-grid models, and in particular, uncertainty quantification in current models when various scales and grid sizes are combined, remains a challenge.
Impact: The immediate pay-off of these research efforts is: (1) a better understanding of multiphase reactive turbulent flow phenomenology and the quantification of the releases in energy; and (2) an understanding of how biological agents react in hot corrosive environments. The use of this understanding will improve weapon performance and optimize tools for the weapons effects predictions.
The farther impact of this research would be the capability to effectively defeat biological- and chemical-agent facilities by designing weapons to eliminate collateral damage.
Objective: In order to eliminate undesired collateral effects of Agent Defeat weapons, the objective of this topic is to grow experimentally validated equations and models of the probabilities of biological agents initially transported in relatively cool air getting intimately mixed with hot/corrosive gases, the distribution of biological agents by turbulent instabilities, and the possibility of an extremely small population of the agents surviving and escaping to the environment.
Therefore, research in this topic belongs to two major categories:
- Turbulent Reactive Mixing: The objective is to gain an understanding of turbulent mixing and instabilities of aerosolized biological agents in atmospheres of high temperatures and corrosive/reactive gas environment. Research in computational fluid dynamics is needed to develop a novel approach to describe the mixing phenomena.
- Biological Agent Neutralization: The objective is to gain an understanding of how biological agents 'die' as a result of interactions with heat and reactive materials or corrosive gases. Research should focus on experiments to characterize the reaction of biological agent simulants in temperature environments (30°C to 300°C) in contact with (a) reactive materials; (b) corrosive reaction product gases such as HCl and HF; and (c) detonation products such as H2O, NO2, and CO.
Topic C: Nano-sized Thermosensor Materials
(Thrust 1)
Background: Many methods have been developed for measuring temperature. Most of these rely on measuring some property of a working material that varies with temperature. Common thermometers use properties such as thermal expansion, resistance, and irradiance to measure temperature. All these temperature measuring techniques have been around for many decades. With the advent of nano materials, discovery of irreversible phase transitions, advances in non-linear and other optical or quantum effects, it may now be possible to find revolutionary new methods for measuring temperature.
DTRA's counter-WMD mission includes research and development of weapons, in particular Agent Defeat weapons. Such weapons use a combination of explosive, thermal and chemical kill mechanisms, to create high temperatures of critical duration to neutralize biological weapon agents. When such a weapon is deployed, the resultant turbulence creates a complex heterogeneous environment of bursting vessels, fragmenting equipment and aerosolized liquids within the blast radius. We need to characterize this spatially and temporally non-uniform thermal environment under extreme conditions such as at hundreds of kilopascals of pressure (100 KPa), and in very transient atmospheres that change every microsecond. Current technologies cannot provide the desired information, but exploration of thermo-properties of nanomaterials could lead to revolutionary new ways to measure temperature in these extreme environments.
Impact: The immediate potential payoff of these research efforts is expected to be the development of nano-sized dynamic temperature sensors. Such sensors will provide us with the ability to measure temperatures inside the blast and fireball, which in turn will vastly improve blast and weapon modeling. The ability of such sensors to retain the temperature history felt by simulant bio-agent materials when Agent Defeat weapons are tested, will result in better designed agent defeat weapons that can achieve higher kill percents. This will improve weapon and target planning for defeat of WMD, reduce or eliminate collateral effects and enhance post-strike assessments, in all attempts to successfully destroy WMD in hostile environments.
Objective: The objective of this topic is to support fundamental research to identify and characterize the means and materials that will measure the temperature and perhaps also retain the complete thermal history of events (1 to 180 seconds) involving extreme conditions ranging from tens to hundreds of kilopascals of pressure (100 KPa), hundreds of degrees of temperature (maximum 700°C), and microsecond changes of these conditions.
Ideally, the thermometer (or thermal sensor) should sense spatially variable temperatures inside the dark, smoky blast cloud or dust plume. This could be achieved by spatially distributing the thermal sensor with the blast, by mixing the thermal sensors in to the Agent Defeat weapon fill or in to the bio-weapon agent simulants used in testing. In either case, the thermometers need to be the about the same size (0.5-5µm) and have the same aerodynamic properties as dust particles or bio-agent simulant spores. Possible research directions can include the creation and study of nano-composite particles that change and maintain material phases after a thermal event; micro-encapsulated materials that when exposed to a thermal event releases the encapsulated material for analysis, etc.
Topic D: Sensing Fissile Material at Long Range using Novel Methods
(Thrust 1)
Background: This topic seeks to advance the knowledge of novel sensing methods providing a foundation for the ability to non-invasively detect shielded fissile material, with low signal to noise ratios, at long range using other methods than the direct sensing of the gamma rays and neutrons from the radioactive decay of fissile material.
Conventional methods of sensing fissile material by direct detection of gamma rays and neutrons have limited distances of effectiveness. Current stand off detection distances are on the order of meters Increasing the stand off detection distance to 100 meters or more is desirable. Increasing the stand off detection distance to 1000 meters would be revolutionary.
One area of exploration that is of interest is the creation and properties of secondary effects caused by radiological materials interacting with the surrounding environment and shielding material. However, the exploration of a muon generating source that could be used to stimulate emissions from fissile material may be of interest. Research advancing the knowledge of novel methods to detect fissile material may lead to the ability to remote sense shielded fissile material, with low signal to noise ratios, at long range.
Impact: This topic is important to the counter-WMD mission of DTRA by addressing the need to extend detection of fissile materials and nuclear weapons to distances beyond the short-range that is the current state-of-the-art. Developing novel detection methods could lead to the ability to sense shielded fissile material, with low signal to noise ratios, from stand off ranges of hundreds of meters to as great as 1000+ meters.
Objective: This topic explores novel methods and advancements in the ability to remote sense shielded fissile material, with low signal to noise ratios, from significant stand off ranges. Specific interest includes detection methods not utilizing direct sensing of gamma rays and neutrons from the decay of fissile material.
Some of the research areas may include (but are not limited to):
- Examine the interactions of non-ionizing radiation with fissile material and explore novel concepts for possible signature generation
- Advance the knowledge of physical or chemical interactions of radiological materials with adjacent explosive/energetic materials, and explore novel concepts for possible signature generation
- Examine interactions of nuclear radiation (such as gamma photons and neutrons) with adjacent electronic materials, and identify and investigate resulting novel signatures that may be induced in these materials and associated structures
- Advance the knowledge of the physics of muon source generation, including novel accelerator phenomena, and the interactions and resulting emissions of the generated muons with fissile material
- Examine the use of ultrasound to sense fissile material through intervening media
- Advance the knowledge of the interactions of sub-atomic particles, or techniques to stimulate emissions, from special nuclear materials to explore novel concepts for possible signature generation
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