Research Summaries

Back Naval Postgraduate School Counter Directed Energy Weapons Research

Fiscal Year 2014
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Center for Decision, Risk, Controls & Signals Intelligence
Investigator(s) Sritharan, Sivaguru S.
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary The goal of this component of the NPS research program (jointly funded by MASINT) is to develop real time inversion techniques to remotely detect and assess the characteristics of High Energy Laser Weapons (HEL), High Powered Microwave (HPM) weapons and Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons based on suitable surveillance sensor data. Most desirable information for the "blue-team" during a directed energy weapons attack include (1) type of weapon; (2) power level of the source; (3) wavelength; (4) location (range) and orientation of the weapon (beam angle); (5) volume scattering and (6) polarization. NPS currently has an ongoing research program supported jointly by the National Consortium for MASINT Research Program and the Office of Naval Research Counter Directed Energy Weapons Program to develop methods to detect, assess and to devise counter measures for high-powered RF and Laser weapons attack. Although current focus is on continuous-wave Laser weapons, we are keenly interested in counter measures against pulse wave electromagnetic weapons, microwave weapons as well as highly tunable Free Electron Lasers. The primary technical approach of the current effort is to develop generalized inversion algorithms to extract Laser scattering and turbulence information from (off-axis) bi-static collection geometries. This is an extremely complex problem and solutions will depend on laser/microwave parameters (power and wavelength), engagement geometry (range and laser pointing direction) and atmospheric conditions (relative humidity and wind speed). There is a pressing need for new and innovative laser/microwave collection sensors. Without a significantly better understanding of possibilities of bistatic detection, the designers of future sensor may omit critical functionality. The knowledge gained from this effort will be critical in design of the next generation of laser intelligence sensors. Therefore, potential inversion algorithms must rely on measurements that are both physically and practically possible. To accomplish this objective we will look at the model Hierarchies starting from Maxwell equations to the pencil-beam radiative transport equation ("search light problem") to explicit (phenomenological) approximate representations for intensity such as Mie scattering combined with atmospheric particle distribution models. It may be impossible to find a physically realizable algorithm that can be solved if all the parameters are unknown and it may be necessary to bound or estimate certain parameters. It is critical to understand how parameter approximations impact the algorithm's effectiveness.
Keywords
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal