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Australian Army Invests in Electrical Shirts
Stony Stevenson writes "The Australian Defence Department has injected $4.4 million worth of funding to further Australia's national science agency's (the CSIRO) research into designing clothing which can be used as a self-recharging electrical source on the battlefield. The Defence Department is hoping the technology can be used to replace cumbersome disposable batteries that soldiers must carry on the battlefield. The Flexible Integrated Energy Device (FIED) will be used to store and provide energy over a continuous period of time. It can be charged by either vibration energy harvesting or through plugging into an electrical power point."
True, but I guess those shirt will harvest energy from body heat the soldiers would have lost anyway and from movements the soldiers would have done anyway. This way, the shirt would only be recycling energy which would've been otherwise lost.
On the other hand, imagine if the battery somehow breaks starting to leak acid all over the guy's skin.
:(){
I thought our politicians only saw it fit to buy decommissioned US junk, such as 30 year-old helicopters, and the odd fleet of dud tanks and fighter jets. Perhaps this is Howard's idea of renewable resources. Personally, I'd rather just put the grunts put to work in a more economic - imagine how much clean energy we could produce if we took our soldiers from the bloodbaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lined them up in a big grid of treadmill generators. We could put a picture of Kylie Minogue in front of them, and maybe a picture of Bin Laden behind her. This would pretty much motivate the lot of them.
The extra weight of the clothing is offset by not having to carry the extra batteries. So it shouldn't place anymore weight on the troop. I know it's much more convenient for me to wear a loaded photographers vest than it is to carry the bag. Same weight, but the distribution of that weight on your shoulders feels much better at the end of the day.
My concerns are these.
What's this vest made of? If a trooper takes a bullet through the vest, what type of stuff from the vest is going to follow the bullet into the body?
If this shirt is meant to be worn under armor then what impact does the constraint of being sandwiched between the body and the armor have on the overall effectiveness of the shirt?
If the shirt is meant to be worn over the armor, is there any redundancy to the power generation when the shirt takes a hit? With batteries, the trooper could always ask a buddy for a spare battery. Asking for the shirt from your buddies back, in combat, would probably be looked on negatively.
Build some solar cells into their helmets.
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Sooner or later this kind of tech is going to result in a stilsuit. Hope so anyway, those things are just too cool not to be instantiated.
Seriously though, if we colonise mars, they will be more then interesting, they may well be essential.
Frank Herbert had way more right than people realise. Except for the spice thing, but if I have this right, in his original musings on the story, spice wasn't as important, and it was Stilgar, not Paul Atraides who was to be the major character.
If a soldier gets shot? What would typically be a bad flesh wound now has an electric battery system thrown in there as well...
Shock shirts: soldiers will _always_ obey their orders without any hesitation.
There you are, staring at me again.
Having spent some time in the field wearing various uniforms, I have to say, the idea of wearing a bunch of plastic and metal fibers in the field doesn't sound very appealing. It sounds like a recipe for heat exhaustion.
Are other energy sources really so inconvenient that this is justifiable?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth