About the team

We are a group of faculty members from Khalifa University, from the Chemistry and the Mechanical Engineering Departments. We are research active people who work well together to solve technical/ knowledge challenges. we have published hundreds of papers on a diverse range of subjects in very high quality journals. Between us we own several patents. We are interested in this challenge because we see it as a great way of turning our technical expertise into a useful product.

Technical Information

In the battlefield there are many occasions when concealment behind a smokescreen are required. The most important is to obscure the precise location of troops and vehicles during an attack, preventing the targeting of the assets. Other applications, such as ground force identification using colored smoke will not be addressed in this application.
Obscurant smoke can be caused by two physical principles: the physical blocking of light due to opaque materials and the scattering of light (the Tyndal Effect) by droplets of similar size as the wavelength of light.
Opaque materials such as carbon black can be produced during the incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons. The carbon particles (soot) are very small and produce intense absorption of light. However the toxicity of such a system is very high due to the formation of other products of incomplete combustion such as carbon monoxide. The soot also contaminates everything and the troops would suffer lung damage if inhaled.
White smoke can be produced by the addition of diesel into the exhaust of a hot engine, such as an aircraft jet turbine, the small droplets produced scatter visible light and produce the required effect. However the smoke produced is flammable and therefore fails the non-flammable requirement.
Team concept:
Our approach to this problem is to develop an obscurant smoke using small droplets of a liquid. Our inspiration for this comes from the current practice of “vaping”, or e-cigarettes. Some of the smoke products produce a very intense and long lasting obscurant smoke which we think can be adapted to battlefield obscuring applications. The active ingredient in these smoke products is a mixture of different glycols and water. There are several advantages to this approach; most notably that the smoke produced is nontoxic and non-flammable.
We aim to develop a three component self-contained “grenade”
The grenade will consist of two concentric tubes. When pulled apart they activate the system
A small battery will power a fan
The incendiary heat source will ignite, heating the air
The heated glycol mix will be atomized into a smoke
This system can be designed to be thrown by a soldier, and will be man portable, similar in size to current grenades. Alternatively the system can be uprated for vehicle or ship mounting. we have a short proof of concept lab experiment available on you tube https://youtu.be/_1LXjYYSEjs other effects such as IR absorption can be added to the system

About Team Leader

Team members