2016
The European Commission has connected 28 teams of scientists from across Europe and Japan in a project aimed at finding better and more accessible demining solutions, called TIRAMISU (Toolbox Implementation for the removal of Antipersonnel Mines, Submunitions and Unexploded Ordnance).
The scientists have created a variety of tools to detect and neutralize explosives in the form of mines or unexploded ordnance, which remain in the ground decades after armed conflicts.
Professor Adam Januszko, who heads the team at the Military Institute of Engineering Technology in Wroclaw, presented some of the five designs contributed to the project by his scientists.
One of them is a device which targets a mine's detonator, making it inoperable and safe to dispose of. The device is aimed at the mine and remotely detonated, without impacting the main explosive charge inside.
"We use an explosive charge placed in the housing, which is detonated by a fuse, and in this section we placed a very important element. We call it an insert, which means that we can shoot it at the mine's detonator trying to neutralize it. A mine without a detonator will not explode," Januszko explained.
Information:
Clearing large civilian areas from anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions is a difficult problem because of the large diversity of hazardous areas and explosive contamination. A single solution does not exist and many mine action actors have asked for a toolbox from which they could choose the tools best fit to a given situation. Some have built their own toolboxes, usually specific to some precise tasks, such as clearance.
The TIRAMISU project aims at providing the foundation for a global toolbox that will cover the main mine action activities, from the survey of large areas to the actual disposal of explosive hazards, including mine risk education. The toolbox produced by the project will provide mine action actors with a large set of tools, grouped into thematic modules, that will help them do their job. These tools will have been designed with the help of end-users and validated by them in mine affected countries.
To reach the level of expertise needed the TIRAMISU team includes organisations that were involved in some of the most important European and international research projects in mine action of the last fifteen years. The TIRAMISU partners will build on their past experience of this topic, their long tradition to work with each other, and the strong links they have forged over the years with mine action centres and mine action authorities, demining companies and non-governmental organisations, to bring a toolbox that will represent a step forward in mine action by being the basis for a unifying, comprehensive and modular integrated solution to the clearing of large areas from explosive hazards.
The philosophy of the TIRAMISU project is to concentrate most of its efforts, not on already existing technology, but on the most mature technologies and methods that are still to be fielded and on promising and innovating solutions even if they may require more work to be fielded.
24 мар 2024
