Broad Coverage

Protecting national resources including humans from invasion of any form is crucial to any country and is carried out by its Defence. Role of Science and Technology in building a nation's defence infrastructure is the key. In future, attacks may be more Technical, Information based and Accurate. It may neither involve human beings nor arms and ammunitions (for eg., a Cyber attack). The technological requirements to fight the “Modern War” necessitates a large multi-disciplinary Research and Development framework spread across the Academia and Industry that envisages, formulates and solves the challenges to “fight” the “Modern war” as well as terrorism. The IMPRINT India initiative will attempt to develop a blueprint of this framework including education policies aimed to generate skilled manpower needed to work on the challenges posed. Defence requirements can be broadly classified into four themes, namely, Life Sciences; Materials; Electronics and Communication Systems; and Combat Engineering Systems. Grand Challenges in each of these themes are presented below.

Life Sciences

The soldier is as important as the weapon. Ensuring the well being of a soldier is paramount to enable best performance at wartime, which continues to be a challenge that needs to be addressed

Health Care: Welfare of the soldier on the battlefield is of prime importance. The challenges are to protect them from different forms of attacks; devise effective ways for reaching medical assistance to the site; and, medical treatment procedures for quick healing of the injury. Continuous monitoring of health parameters of a soldier in action is also of prime importance. Specific challenges in this area are as listed below.

• Portable Health Care for quick and accurate diagnosys and First-Aid

• Development of “Regenerative Medicine” for “Rapid Wound Healing”, “Rapid Bone-Reconstruction", Injectable scaffolds for bone loss and repair.

• Defence health care instrumentation monitoring and expert systems using big Data analytics

• Wearable medical devices for army personnel health monitoring

• Dermal-protection for on-field soldiers

Nuclear Biological Chemical Defence: One of the toughest challenges today is to develop capabilities to protect soldiers and common people from the consequences of Nuclear, Biological or Chemical attacks. The toughness is primarily due to the fact that these attacks may not be as explicit as a conventional attack like a gunfight and can take place silently. These attacks can cause much widespread damage than the conventional ones. Specific challenges in this area are as listed below.

• Contamination Avoidance, Protection and Decontamination

• Water and food purification systems

• NBC Protective clothing

• Large portable protective tents

• Medical Management of Biological and Chemically Contaminated Casualties

• Hazard estimation

• Radiological Monitor/Survey

• Radiological Hazard Prediction

• NBC Defence Training through simulations and wargames

Materials

Materials that aid in development of effective defence technologies are the most vital. The effectiveness is measured in terms of enhanced safety that it provides to systems and personnel.

Smart Materials: Intelligence need to be built at every level to win a war and that includes the materials used to build defence weapons and systems. The challenge is to understand and model the environment in a battlefield and study the behavior of materials under such environments. Specific challenges in this area are as listed below.

• Design & development of Bullet proof and Blast proof light weight material systems

• Design & development of high frequency/high temperature semiconductor devices & circuits for harsh environments

• Soft magnetic materials for high frequency applications, magnetic markers

• Fabrication of high energy and high power density hybrid supercapacitor

• Explosive Detection, Chemical screening, Super-hard materials, GaN and Ga2O3 material growth and device fabrication, 2D materials and devices

• Development of rejoinable polymeric materials with high healing efficiency

• Development of surface coatings for better corrosion resistance properties under aggressive environment

• Fatigue studies of advanced composite materials for structural application in aircrafts

• Organic molecular electronic materials

• Development of Functional Materials and Light Weight Composites for Stealth Applications in RF, Microwave and THz Frequency Range

• Micro Fuel Cell in MEMS used in Missile systems

• Composites with improved electrical conduction, Stealth composites, sandwich structures

Sensors: In the age of informed wars wherein, monitoring of the battlefield need to be done remotely based on different real-time parameters inside the battlefield and guidance provided from a central control center, the challenge is to build weight, size and power optimized sensors that can accurately sense these in-field parameters. Specific challenges in this area are as listed below.

• Development of RF Sensors, Thin film/Nano sensors, Magnetic Sensors, Self-powered sensors, wearable sensors/textile based technologies for army men

• Sensors for improvised explosive device detection, organic sensors for explosive device detection, Handheld gas sensing system to selectively detect toxic gases.

• Morphing structures, energy generation from vibrations to power up small electronics/sensors