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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 (0.4-0.76μm) 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 (1-3μm), middle-infrared (3-5μm), far-infrared (8-14μm), 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 20m3 smoke chamber. The testing wavebands employed in experiments are
1.06μm and 10.6μm laser, 3-5μm and 8-14μm 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 1m2·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
1.06μm, 10.6μm, 3-5μm and 8-12μm IR waveband.
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