Computer learners

Off the Shelf Hardware For Military Use Has Other Applications

One of the major changes in vertical integrated markets is the application of "commercial off the shelf" hardware for the defence sector. Defence programmes, in their need to cover greater areas with reduced budgets and tighter manpower restrictions, have gradually shifted away from the usual gamut of top down deliverables.

This has been highlighted by everything from GPS receivers to boots and camping gear being added to the standard military kit, and more manufacturers, who have discovered the military word of mouth market, are designing known military capabilities into their new releases to capture those sales.

This does offer some additional capabilities for people buying products for system integration; products designed to handle the rigors of full deployments in Kabul or Kandahar are rugged, designed for fault tolerance, and have a lot of input from in the field users for ways to make them work better, or are put into circumstances where their capabilities are tested.

From the perspective of manufacturers in the electronics fields, meeting military specifications for the Ministry of Defence, and then bringing the items out to a general service level of sales means that there's a solid chance to recoup development costs, while having features that competing products won't have, and that competitors can't copy without investing significantly into research and development.

Getting further into this market shows that there are some concerns; there are notable differences between milspec equipment and equipment designed for industrial or consumer use; for example, most military hardware has to operate in environs that aren't as friendly as a typical forming plant. Likewise, the gear in a forming plant is usually designed with certain minimum operator education levels in mind. While soldiers are well trained, navigating a complex user interface is very low on their training list; this puts a premium on tools that can be learnt quickly and used reliably, whilst it also tends to focus on single use systems rather than programmable interfaces.

One case example of the differences (and opportunities) comes in making thermal management systems. When designing military hardware, or electronics, one of the principal boundary constraints that plagues engineers and designers is getting rid of the waste heat inherent in the system. The three ways to get rid of waste heat in a system are convection, conduction and radiation; of the three, convection is the most convenient - it's why there are fans in the cases of computers. Conduction happens as part of the process of generating thermal equilibrium, and radiation happens when neither of the other two does.

When designing electronics, ensuring proper air flow through the system, or ensuring that there's a conductive surface to get air flow to the appropriate parts is a challenge. Even worse, because heat radiation efficiency is a fourth power relationship to radiator temperature due to Boltzmann's constant, and hot radiators are usually bad for other parts of integrated systems, the entire arrangement will be designed around competing goals. The first goal will be to reduce weight, the second goal will be to ensure that the entire system doesn't get too hot to be usable, and the third goal will be managing power throughout the system.

The result of this is a lot of thought put into temperature sensors triggering fans, and use of adaptive cooling mechanisms and liquid transfer coolants in electronics, all of which represent a hybrid design strategy between military usage and consumer electronics. The temperature sensors and fans need to be robust enough to operate in dusty environments with a lot of vibration and sudden shocks, and they need to trigger reliably when heat rises to help dissipate it.