Making Anti-Missile MTV Flares

good day welcome back to another episode of explosions and fire I get to start with some news earlier in the year I was complaining cuz I actually had to write my thesis for my PhD which was due I've done that now it's done it's in so as a new PhD graduate I get to consider my two career options Finance or the war which is why I'm excited to talk to you today about micr second TR yes what if we taught this circuit board to experience greed no um I'm not emotionally ready for a real job yet so I'm staying in Academia but anyway what we're talking about today are IR countermeasures for air-to-air Warfare in which you assume both sides on the war can afford a Jet Plane flares for infrared countermeasures have some really interesting signs behind them so we're going to be talking about that today and making our own flare mix and also making our own pretend missile Seeker it's definitely a pretend missile 10 Seeker right we're not going to be making an actually good missile Seeker here that's the kind of activity that moves you from the government watch list to the Government Act to list we'll be discussing basically 1960s era Tech in this video just because I like the' 60s modern missiles have probably achieved full sentience and you got to feed them like complicated sedus on their flight over otherwise they would get bored but the MTV flares and the flare technology was used for a very long time and is probably still used a little bit today but very first too much talking already let's make a flare surely we can make a flare from just things we have lying around the house we'll get some hexamine here it'll burn well but not too hot and some strontium chloride which will make the strontium emission lines and we've got this expired flare here which is lying around and this bag of potassium chlorate why not we'll mix up a ratio and it does burn pretty well I mean eventually we don't want it to go crazy we're not trying to make it blow up here but we just want to see some nice colors and the red does come through I think it could probably use some more ptas chlorate I just sort i' through this together if we try again with some more potassium chlorate in the mix it does burn a little better but you know you lose a bit more of that red color so there's a bit of an art to the flare mix but what's up with that expired flare is probably more of the important question flares have a very limited shelf life and shouldn't be stored or used past their expiry date I wasn't really expecting them to work that well until I saw it made in West Germany and I knew these were still going to work way too good for being way past that expiry date there was still no way I was going to hold it in my hand though I just clamped it down because it could just explode into a big Fireball and that would be very bad it's hard to know exactly what chemicals are used in a flare especially a flare that was made in West Germany but the color is definitely indicative of strontium the strontium emission lines is what gives it this beautiful red color and makes it so bright smoke all right well that's a good flare I guess I mean it's a good visible flare but it would be terrible as a counter IR measure so why is that what's so special about IR flares and how do we make them a hugely influential technology that was developed during World War II was the radar proximity bomb which allowed bombs to kind of detect when they were close to a plane which made them a lot more effective the idea of self-guided weapons was already around in the 1940s but they lacked the sensing technology to take it that one step further because there is an obvious thing that gives away a plane's position the amount of heat it gives off but here lies the challenge of the technology most of the thermal radiation given off by a hot plane would be in the kind of 8 to 10 Micron band and that's what you kind of normally see with a thermal camera but you know what else releases 8 to 10 microns the ground and the sun emits a lot of it and I mean you do but if you're clever about it there's a much more specific thermal signature that comes from a jet and that comes from its engines apart from just being hotter so it will emit much more shorter wavelength radiation you also have the burning fuel and the CO2 that's emitted and that will emit a sort of distinct thermal signature kind of looks like this so if you know the missile is

looking for this particular thermal signature your decoy flare needs to have the same thermal signature in order to confuse the missile so how do we properly replicate the thermal signature of a jet engine that answer is the MTV flare the m in MTV stands for magnesium and this is obviously a very hot Burning metal very flammable metal but this is paired with a pretty strange oxidizer Teflon it's the same chemical that's used to make pans nonstick I did think for this project I would have to like sand down a whole heap of non-stick pans but turns out you can just buy GRS of this bloody Teflon powder cuz it's used in bike chains or something after filming I'm just going to do a fat line of this Teflon and just have the godamn slipper of inside even very crudely mixed the fine Teflon powder drastically increases the burn rate of the Magnesium it also produces some weird fluorinated smoke so we won't be breathing this but things get even more dramatic once we dredge up some magnesium powder I mean they're not insane powerful flash powder mixes probably cuz the Magnesium powder is really not that fine and is probably really old they burn really easily and burn very bright Teflon is known as being a very inert substance so it's a bit of a strange oxidizer here but it works because magnesium fluoride is such a stable end product so even though it takes a lot of energy to break all those carbon Florine bonds you get all that energy back and more because you're making such a stable magnesium fluoride product but lots of P techic mixtures burn really hot so what makes this particular weird mix of chemicals good as an IR countermeasure well if we look at the plate after the reaction mix is done we see the secret unburnt carbon because the Magnesium has such a high affinity for that Florine it produces Elemental carbon as a byproduct I got to stop flash banging myself what the [ __ ] some of the carbon particles will also burn in the air and oxidize so you'll get this CO2 thermal emission as well so that's how it mimics the jet Eng we kind of have this secondary glowing hot carbon effect in the air which makes this nice IR thermal signature the final ingredient for a true MTB flare mix is viton so viton is not quite as resistant to chemicals as Teflon is because there still is some carbon hydrogen bonds there but the polymer itself has different physical properties and it's much more rubbery and much more flexible than Teflon Von is commonly used in really expensive O-rings which I got some and then realized it was potentially the stupidest way to get a chemical as really well machined O-rings cuz this pack cost me like 30 bucks uh found out you could buy just huge sheets of Von so we we've got this big rubber sheet of the floro polymer you can hack it up into little chunks and put it into an extractor and fill the extractor with acetone and the acetone will slowly dissolve parts of the polymer causing it to swell and dissolving just a little bit over time the role of the viton is as a binder because you don't want a pyrot techic mix that's just as a loose powder with you know static sensitivity and really easy to ignite so viton holds it all together as a sort of a rubbery Mass which is more stable to the air and water and it's much easier to handle you don't sacrifice the performance of the pyate technque at all even though it has quite a high amount of binder after we've isolated the viton we can redissolve it in some acetone and then just suspend in the Teflon and then the Magnesium powder and then we're going to add this suspension into some hexanes I mean here I'm just using shite because it's from Bunnings and I don't know who else uses this so I feel like if I stop buying it Bunnings will stop selling it so uh it's like a couple bucks and it's like hexanes it's so good Bunnings keep selling this please anyway this causes the Von to precipitate really rapidly and it's meant to form a bit of a gel I never quite got the art to it some shapes I made were a little dry some of the stuff I made was a bit too rubbery but anyway we did make some shapes of MTV flare mix with the binder and they still burn really well so we've done it we've made some MTV flare mix they burn the question now comes do they make the correct IR thermal signature it's missile seek a time please allow me to show some PowerPoint slides human beings were never meant to see into the IR and it angers God for us to Bear witness to the ghosts that lay increasingly beyond the range of our mortal Vision therefore the further into the IR you want to see the more poisons you have to put into your detector the visible range is best imaged by silicon detectors a friendly non-toxic element beyond that we have the Arsenic Zone

then we move into the lead Zone finally we reach the Mercury cadmium toide Zone that's the sensors that are used on normal thermal cameras don't eat a thermal camera torium is not healthy either okay sorry I have more slides I got to go back into presentation mode you might ask what is beyond 10 Micron it does continue all the way up to 11 perhaps even 12 Micron that is the edge of science everything Beyond this range belongs to the engineer is so the 2 to 5 Micron band is the area where we want and it's a very hard range to image the best choice is probably like a lead selenoid or lead sulfide detector and they're cool detectors then they're not cheap and they're also like export controlls they're hard to buy because people are using them for like missile Seekers or whatever so we got to get a little bit more creative this is a thermopile array so the sensor technology is made up of just like little resistors that measure changes in heat so it's kind of a very bad thermal camera the other drawback is the sensor size is only like 32x 24 pixels and this was one of the highest resolution ones I could find I mean there were higher resolution ones on eBay but they were just genuine spyware at this point it wants to connect to Wi-Fi and USB and like it doesn't needed instead of just being sensitive around the 8 to 10 Micron range they have hugely Broadband sensitivity it has an anti-reflection coating so it can't see visible light but it should be able to see everything from like 1 to 10 microns it's got this really Broadband sensitivity so we just need to filter it down to our targeted wavelength range and we can do that by using sapphires so Sapphire has really strong absorbance of anything longer than 5 microns so by putting in front of our sensor it'll block out all that thermal radiation above our targeted range so using my PhD and Optics I carefully designed a mount to perfectly align this filter I hot glued it I [ __ ] hot glued it even I'm ashamed of this hand work that's but God damn it works can't see me at all because I'm not emitting light shorter than 5 microns but we turn on the butane torch and it sees it perfectly so we now have for like less than $200 an Imaging missile Seeker array so [ __ ] eat [ __ ] it who will employ me I need to be employed all right here we're using a small candle as a pretend jet plane for our Imaging a r to lock Contour but lighning of flarex completely overwhelms the camera and we lose sight of our Target for as long as the flarex burns which isn't very long but it seems pretty easy to overwhelm the sensor from this close what if we were back say 15 M away can we still do it then instead of the small candle this time we're using a big mercury lamp as our pretend jet plane and our Imaging sensor once again locks onto the signal very easily but once our infrared counter measure lights we lose easy light blocking of that signal so I think it's working once again the burn time isn't very good so instead of just having a loose pile of powder I managed to confine it and throttle it a little bit in this cardboard tube obviously for an actual device you would want a much longer burn time because obviously it works as a Decoy for as long as it burns and in the 1960s actual MTV flares generally burn for about 10 seconds however they were generally about 250 g yeah you wouldn't want to be near that when it went off a ground level but I think burn rate is reasonably similar you know it's not close but it's not too far off so we have made some empty V flare mix and confirmed that it does work as an infrared counter measure so now we can really go to our ideal goal of this project which is it possible to use air to AAR infrared counter measures to counter a Nintendo Wii hey man here you got to wear these oh what I'll get the gas mask okay sure this doesn't make perfect sense cuz the Nintendo Wii worked at an IR wavelength just shorter than one micron but still let me do this science okay this is good science so we got the flamix here the Wii sensor bar is just two iring LEDs which are tracked by the remote so if we have the IR flare mix that goes off and emits IR light it should distract the remotes we should see that cursor on the screen deflect away so are you ready for this did it work in the sliders uh maybe I can't tell cuz I can't see where the CR I reckon the Crosshair is definitely deflected across the screen as we lit the stuff up it's pretty r but I reckon it definitely worked how cool is

that was that was ap's cool can we go inside now all right that's it we survived another video can buy shirts the shirts are cool and they prevent me from having to pretend I'm qualified to get a job in finance um I'm never going to get a job am I