On Monday, 27 May, a EU funded project bringing together 19 entities from across 9 Member States was presented at the Press Club in Brussels.
Led by the Portuguese Technological Centre for Textile and Clothing Industry CITEVE, the project, named ACROSS (Adaptive Camouflage foR sOldierS and vehicleS), aims to develop disruptive technologies and solutions for adaptive camouflage, for soldiers as well as military vehicles. Increasing the camouflage abilities of soldiers directly increases their survivability.
The project was presented by António Braz Costa and Gilda Santos, from CITEVE, Martin Jõesaar, ACROSS Project Officer at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space, and Lieutenant-Colonel Paulo Rodrigues, from the Portuguese Army.
“We aim to be able to develop new equipment that will increase soldiers’ performance and ability to survive. This is a challenge and it will not be easy but we intend to achieve it by developing new solutions”, Santos explained. “This is an area of opportunity and we need an open mind and will have to carry out lots of tests. But the whole thing is all orientated for the end user: the soldier.”
“This project shows we can do this for ourselves here in Europe. With this project, everything stays in Europe and will support local supply chains. At present we in Europe do depend to some extent on other countries and regions, like the US and Asia, but we need to do these things ourselves within Europe and I am glad to say the specialists involved in the ACROSS project are trying to do this”, said Jõesaar.
Fully funded by the European Defence Fund (EDF), the €14.57 million project seeks to develop multispectral, adaptive camouflage solutions that are able to adapt their signatures to different backgrounds, to surveillance sensors, different weather and light conditions and threat levels to reduce the ranges of detection, tracking, recognition and identification.
To reach this goal, ACROSS is conducting research on the combination of innovative and current technologies using disruptive materials to achieve protection on the following spectral ranges: UV radiation (100-380 nm), VIS radiation (380-780 nm), near IR (0.75–1.4 μm), short-wavelength IR (1.4–3 μm), mid-wavelength IR (3-8 μm) and long-wavelength IR (8-15 μm), along with radar bands X (8–12 GHz), Ka (27-40 GHz) and W (75-119 GHz).
Stressing the on the field importance of increasing camouflage capabilities, Lieutenant-Colonel Rodrigues said that “what this type of technology can give to a soldier is life – the chance to live after the battle.” Besides the better hiding features, it will also save soldiers valuable time when switching from one environment to the other. “For example, if they are moving from a forest to an urban landscape, they don’t have to take the time to change their clothes”, he added.
The implementation period is of 42 months, 6 of which have already passed. The development of the materials will take place in stages. The compatibility of materials with different spectre lengths will be tested in a first conceptual demonstrator, which will be presented to the end user, i.e. the army, for feedback. Building from the first demonstrator, a conceptual design followed by a global demonstrator will be developed. By the last year, it is hoped solid prototypes can be more widely tested by the military.
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