Stealth Paint From German Inventor Werner Nickel

Gerhardius writes "Werner Nickel sounds like a Disney-style wacky inventor. He moved to the UAE to develop his previous invention: he had bred a worm whose excrement made it possible to grow radishes in the dry desert sand. That project failed so he moved on to the next item on his agenda, naturally a radar absorbing paint. While it certainly is not unique, there is some interesting history behind the development, and a proposed civilian use."

Comments

Re:Civilian use?

[Brandybuck]

Except that commercial airports use transponders, not radar, to locate planes.

Re:Civilian use?

[Deadstick]

Oh, jeez...

The transponders are in the airplanes, not on the airports. They help the airport's radar to see airplanes.

A transponder is a combination of a receiver and a transmitter that receives the pulses from a radar; generates a train of pulses that encode the identification and altitude of the airplane; and transmits them back to the radar. That way the guy sitting at the radar not only sees the airplane more easily, but knows which airplane it is and how high.

rj

Re:Still a long way to go

[CRCulver]

But can that excrement allow humans to see the future and travel faster than light?

If you don't get it, the OP is a reference to Frank Herbert's novel Dune where the chemical produced by the sandwords of the desert planet Arrakis proved the key to faster-than-light travel by giving starship steersmen superhuman powers.

While I admire Herbert's creation of a science fiction novel based on modern studies of desert ecology, I felt the whole spice deal weakened the hard sci-fi goodness of what otherwise would have been a less fantastical book.

Re:There should be many applications for this

[Dr. Cody]

Shielding in Nuclear power plants is an issue that needs to be tackled better.

Actually, no, it isn't. I don't even think it's been an issue that needed to be tackled better within my lifetime. Nor would this help. 20 cm of rolled steel and 1.5 meters of reinforced concrete provides all the radiation protection you need until the pressure vessel ruptures.

Re:There should be many applications for this

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the article, it is not known, at least by the guy that tested the paint, whether it absorbs or scatters the radar waves.

There is no other mention of this in the article to indicate how the paint works.

Re:Civilian use?

[Sique]

If you had RTFA, then you would have stumbled upon the following lines:

In one respect, however, Essen's message is disappointing. Drivers can't expect to become invisible to police radar traps anytime soon. "When an object is moving at such close range," he admits, "even the best shield paint doesn't do any good."

Re:Still a long way to go

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still travel through space without the spice, just not faster than light. Well technically you can, just not safely.

The Spacing Guild has a monopoly on imperial banking and interstellar travel: with the use of melange, Guild Navigators are the only beings capable of piloting the massive Guild Heighliners safely through space. The heightened awareness and prescience the spice grants allows the Navigator to plot a safe course between the stars.

Heighliner operation requires both a Guild Navigator and a Holtzman generator. The Holtzman generator uses the Holtzman effect to "fold space" and allows virtually instantaneous interstellar travel. The Navigator is responsible for finding a safe path through folded space and guiding the ship. This is accomplished under the influence of melange in the form of orange spice gas. Melange provides the Navigator with the limited form of prescience required.

Re:Still a long way to go

[Sparr0]

You can also go there with the use of really smart computers to do the navigating, but those are banned in the Dune universe due to a war with sentient machines ~10000 years before the time of the Dune books.

Re:Civilian use?

[RoboRay]

That's really not how transponders work. They do not receive the radar pulses and send them back to the radar with ID information encoded into the pulses.

They are totally seperate and unrelated systems operating on radically different frequencies. The only things they have in common is that the base station antenna is typically mounted somewhere on the rotating radar antenna so that they are ensured to both be pointing in the same direction, and they generally share a single display, with the information received from the airborne transponders superimposed over the radar video. You can break either system, and the other one will still work perfectly, just so long as the antenna is still turning and the display still works.

Re:Civilian use?

[Deadstick]

You're describing the distinction between primary and secondary radar. Yes, they're separate systems, but they're both radars. One operates on reflected pulses ("skin painting"), the other on transponded pulses, but they both get their bearing information from the pointing direction of the antenna and their range information from the out-and-return travel time of the pulses. The only difference is that the secondary radar gets information that is furnished by the airborne installation: identification ("squawk code", including emergency and hijack notifications) and pressure altitude.

rj

Re:Or maybe the author is On LSD

[Salus Victus]

When light hits a surface, it can be reflected, or transmitted. If' it's transmitted then it's going to go through the paint and strike the metal and be reflected.

What are you talking about? Matt Black paint, applied to a mirror, does not result in a surface that reflects visible light.

Paint can certainly absorb photons, and translate the energy to a wavelength no longer recognizable as related to the source.

How did the parent post get rated so highly? Has the Slashdot community fallen so far that it's blinded by the mere mention of "scientific" concepts like index of refraction?