Engineers from Imperial College London have developed a new way of detecting landmines in peaty soil, using smouldering fire to uncover their position.
Known as O-Revealer, the prototype device uses an electric power source and a heating coil that is inserted into the top layer of peaty ground. It then slowly heats the peat to 500 degrees Celsius, igniting it and causing a smouldering, flameless fire that reveals the position of landmines below.
Testing in the lab under simulated conditions found the device was able to partially unearth both plastic and metal dummy landmines. The team discovered that under dry windy conditions, the O-Revealer could potentially set off plastic SB-33 mines. However, metal PROM-1 mines would not explode regardless of the soil and weather conditions. The work is published in the journal Experimental Thermal and Fluid Science.
“The insidious threat of landmines and their impact on people is well documented around the world,” said lead author Dr Guillermo Rein, from Imperial’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “However, the technical and safety challenges in removing these minefields are huge. Even a rich and technologically advanced country such as the UK faces challenges.”
“The British government, for example, had a legal responsibility to remove landmines from the Falkland Islands by 2009, but due to the slow rate and high costs of conventional mine removal techniques they’ve had to request a ten-year extension to their programme.”
As part of the study, the team mapped areas of the world where landmines remained in peaty ground and would most benefit from the technology. These included the Falklands where, according to Imperial, only about 20 per cent of the 25,000 landmines planted during the 1982 conflict have been removed. Other areas where the technology could be applied include Vietnam, Burma, Laos, Uganda, Zimbabwe and former Yugoslavia.
The technology is now set to be trialled in the field, initially at a military test site. Later, the team hopes to trial the O-Revealer in the Falklands, where the SB-33 was widely deployed.
Surely this results in the killing-off of peaty land. My understanding is that peat land fires can have a devastating effect on the landscape: I respect the conundrum, we don’t want people inadvertently killed or maimed by redundant, un-cleared land-mines, but surely we don’t want to decimate the local environment either?
I am the leading author of this work, and I have spent more than 15 years of my research helping fight peat fire. For this reason, I am fully aware of the damage a large uncontrolled peat fire can have on the environment and the local population.
In O-Revealer, we use our knowledge of how peat fires ignite, spread and extinguish to obtain a very safe technology. O-Revealer is purposely designed to control the resulting smouldering, keep it very small and monitor the fire at all time, with the ability to quickly suppress it within when desired.
There are DRONES capable of supporting a ground penetration radar that can fly over a mine field and plot the positions exactly. Then fly another drone using those co-ordinates, with a blast percussion gun over the mine and detonate it remotely from above or angle so it is not blown out of the sky. No fires need be started. Much cheaper and quicker!
decimate: this word had its roots in the method of punishment of foot-soldiers in the Roman Army: if something needed correction, every tenth soldier was punished-even to the extent of death! Please would someone with military links tell me what has altered? Presumably some soldier laid these terrible items on the orders of one with more gaudy plumage…so? the solution is obvious?
And how do the fires get put out. Having seen an accidentally lighted fire in peaty soil some years ago it subsequently took the fire service (despite very best efforts) over 5 days to extinguish the fire, which kept ‘smouldering underground’ and resurfacing some not unreasonable distance from the original source.
With the Falkland islands having mostly peat soil these fires could burn for years, and experience and regional knowledge tells me that there is no local fire service that can really keep pitching up to such events, with farmland / rural fires being dealt with more by helicopter and large bucket than a typical fire tender.
Further many of the minefields are beach based in the falklands and mines have shifted tidally with the sands.
Final thought, I know diplomatic relations are tight but surely it is responsibility of ‘he who laid the mines’ to help make the area safe, where is Argentina in all this?
The polluter pays?