Zionist Entity Tactical Laser Fizzles
It appears that the tactical chemical laser the US has been hoping to deploy to protect the Zionist Entity from rockets launched by Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon is, in the words of its developers, "not ready for action." http://www.newsday.com/ap/text/international/ap796.htm According to the defense department blurb on the system, called THEL (http://www.smdc.army.mil/FactSheets/THEL.html), the system employs deuterium fluoride as the lasing medium. Since deuterium is somewhat more expensive to produce than ordinary hydrogen, one wonders why the system has been designed to work with deuterium. Is it because the government does not want fuel for it to be easily produced, should the design fall into enemy hands. Or is there some engineering advantage to using deuterium? Does excited deuterium fluoride have some wonderful spectral line in exactly the right place, that pedestrian hydrogen fluoride does not? Any chemical or nuclear engineers here who could answer the question of why deuterium is more desirable? -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
At 03:34 PM 12/7/00 -0800, Eric Cordian wrote:
It appears that the tactical chemical laser the US has been hoping to deploy to protect the Zionist Entity from rockets launched by Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon is, in the words of its developers, "not ready for action."
http://www.newsday.com/ap/text/international/ap796.htm
According to the defense department blurb on the system, called THEL (http://www.smdc.army.mil/FactSheets/THEL.html), the system employs deuterium fluoride as the lasing medium.
Since deuterium is somewhat more expensive to produce than ordinary hydrogen, one wonders why the system has been designed to work with deuterium. Is it because the government does not want fuel for it to be easily produced, should the design fall into enemy hands.
Or is there some engineering advantage to using deuterium? Does excited deuterium fluoride have some wonderful spectral line in exactly the right place, that pedestrian hydrogen fluoride does not?
Any chemical or nuclear engineers here who could answer the question of why deuterium is more desirable?
That's exactly it. Deuterium-Flourine (and I think Deuterium-Iodine) have a prominent emission line which matches up nicely with CO2. In practice, the DeF/DeI are hypergolically combined in the combustion chamber (that is they combust immediately upon contact) producing an impressive power output. Somewhere inside or just outside the nozzle CO2 is injected and turbulently mixed. Two parallel mirrors perpendicular to the exhaust lase the pumped up C02 and other (tracking) mirrors direct it to the target. Unlike most other high power lasers these babies are CW, not pulsed, and capable of generating multi-megawatt beams. (They work exceptionally well in space if you can keep the fuel/oxidizer from leaking and make sure the exhaust doesn't dissolve the weapon) This was a major Naval project when I worked at TRW in the 80s called Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL) See http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/laser_shootdown_000926.html or search under "TRW chemical laser" steve
At 03:34 PM 12/7/00 -0800, Eric Cordian wrote: I must have been mistaken, according to the material at http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/asat/miracl.htm no CO2 is employed, rather "a fuel (ethylene, C2H4) is burned with an oxidizer (nitrogen trifluoride, NF3). Free, excited fluorine atoms are one of the combustion products. Just downstream from the combustor, deuterium and helium are injected into the exhaust. Deuterium combines with the excited fluorine to give excited deuterium fluoride (DF) molecules, while the helium stabilizes the reaction and controls the temperature. The laser's resonator mirrors are wrapped around the excited exhaust gas and optical energy is extracted. The cavity is actively cooled and can be run until the fuel supply is exhausted. The laser's output power can be varied over a wide range by altering the fuel flow rates and mixture/" steve
participants (2)
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Eric Cordian -
Steve Schear