This year has had its share of science and technology
advances from Army researchers. The US Army Combat
Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) Army Research
Laboratory, the Army's corporate research laboratory, has the
mission to discover, innovate and transition science and technology
to ensure dominant strategic land power.
The lab's chief scientist, Dr. Alexander Kott, picked the coolest
advances to showcase what Army scientists and engineers are
doing to support the Soldier of the future with a look at the 10 most
wanted advancements in technology.
ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES MADE FROM PLASTIC
Future Army robots will be the strongest in the world if visionary
researchers have their way. Robots could be armed with artificial
muscles made from plastic.
Army researchers collaborated with a visiting professor from Florida
A&M University-Florida State University College of Engineering to
study how plastic fibers respond when they are twisted and coiled
into a spring. Different stimuli cause the spring to contract and
expand, mimicking natural muscles.
The team's expertise in polymer science and chemical engineering
helped to identify optimal material property values to achieve the
desired artificial muscle performance targets and helped develop
and implement techniques to measure those material properties.
Artificial muscles could potentially augment robot performance,
allowing our future mechanical partners to buff up, and pump
more iron.
MONITORING SOLDIER HEALTH AND PERFORMANCE
WITH BIORECOGNITION RECEPTORS
Army and academic researchers are looking at how to monitor
Soldier health and performance in real-time, by developing
unique biorecognition receptors. These future bioreceptors
are small, simple to produce, inexpensive, and robust to
environmental stresses.
Once integrated into wearable biosensors, data can be selectively
captured from a complex mixture of sources in theater, like blood,
sweat or saliva.
"The Army will need to be more adaptive, more expeditionary and
have a near-zero logistic demand while optimizing individual to
squad execution in multifaceted operational environments," said Dr.
Matt Coppock, chemist, and team lead. "It can be envisioned that
real-time health and performance monitoring, as well as sensing
current and emerging environmental threats, could be a key set of
tools to make this possible."
The Army of the future may use these wearable sensors to monitor
environmental biothreats and health diagnostics, all with great
benefits to the Soldier.
A WATER-BASED, FIRE-PROOF BATTERY
Army researchers and their partners at the University of Maryland
and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory have developed a
new, water-based, and fire-proof battery.
"Our project addresses the risk by allowing high-energy or highpower
batteries to be put on the Soldier with no risk of the batteries
catching on fire," said Dr. Arthur von Wald Cresce, an Army materials
engineer. "We're hoping that by designing safety into the battery,
this concern goes away, and Soldiers can use their batteries as
they please."
These aqueous lithium-ion batteries replace the highly flammable
electrolyte in lithium-ion batteries, using a nonflammable, waterbased
solvent and also using a lithium salt that is not heat-sensitive,
allowing for batteries to be stored and used at a much broader
range of temperatures.
Cresce and the team first collaborated with scientists at the
University of Maryland to study the properties of a new class of
aqueous electrolytes known as water-in-salt electrolytes and
published their findings in the journal Science.
GENERATING POWER ON-DEMAND WITH HYDROGEN
Imagine if you could generate power on-demand, using just a
tablet and some water.
Army researchers are exploring potential applications for a
structurally stable, aluminum-based nanogalvonic alloy that reacts
with any water-based liquid to produce on-demand hydrogengenerating
power without a catalyst.
"Imagine a squad of future Soldiers on a long-range patrol far from
base with dead batteries and a desperate need to fire up their radio,"
said Dr. Kris Darling, Army materials scientist. "One of the Soldiers
reaches for a metal tablet and drops it into a container and adds
water or some fluid that contains water such as urine, immediately
the tablet dissolves and hydrogen is released into a fuel cell,
providing instant power for the radio."
3-D PRINTING ULTRA-STRONG STEEL
A team of Army researchers have developed a way to 3-D print ultrastrong
metal parts, by adapting an alloy originally developed by the
Air Force into powder form.
With a method called Powder Bed Fusion, a 3-D printer's laser
selectively melts the powder into a pattern. The printer then
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