By Ann Roosevelt
A technology developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, advanced by Battelle and mounted on a helicopter, increases the scope and safety of finding unexploded ordnance (UXO), while reducing cost, officials said.
“Our systems will have typically about eight sensors, sometimes more, spread over about a 12-meter, 40-foot span,” William Doll, geophysicist and technical lead on UXO Helicopter, told Defense Daily in a recent interview. “We collect a big swathe all at once.”
Called UXO helicopter, the aircraft and its boom-mounted magnetic field sensors, GPS and software can cover as much as 800 acres a day at full coverage, providing specific target analysis, he said,
It all started as a Department of Energy mission to clean up the Oak Ridge reservation, David Bell, business development manager, UXO Helicopter, said.
In 1995, the Air Force came looking for technology to help in environmental cleanup, he said. One question that came up was if the technology used to help clean up ORNL also could find bombs and other unexploded munitions.
“That was the genesis for us of taking a DoE-developed technology and tweaking it and adapting it to a DoD problem set–unexploded ordnance,” Bell said.
“Battelle was willing to invest quite a bit to take the next step forward,” Doll said. The technology was then advanced and matured beyond research and development.
“We started working with magnetometers first because they’re easier, then about 2000 or so we started working with an electromagnetic system,” Doll said.
Bell said, “We have done testing of the magnetometer system for the Department of Defense, specifically looking at the ability to detect IEDs. What we proved to them at tests that were done down at Eglin AFB over a site containing surrogate IEDs, is that we can find the IEDs almost 100 percent of the time. While on the one hand the Defense Department is genuinely excited about this capability…the problem is in order to detect 100 percent of these things, we’ve got to fly very, very close to the surface. It’s low enough that it presents an operational challenge–how do you protect the personnel on the aircraft and the aircraft from the very thing you’re trying to find.”
The sensors could be put on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).
“Technically, yes, it could be done,” Bell said. “We can absolutely do this. It’s been proven. We just need a sponsor or sponsors to fund the actual construction of the system.”
Last year, the Australian defense department contracted with UXO helicopter, which spent nearly two months surveying an Air Force base in Queensland.
“We were looking for everything from ordnance to buried infrastructure to abandoned, undocumented waste sites,” Doll said. “They wanted a characterization of the subsurface of this installation such that they could plan for modernization, building new facilities and so forth.”
A recently completed survey for the Navy and Marines at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point off the North Carolina coast demonstrated the technology could be used over shallow water and wetlands that would have been difficult and costly for ground-based systems, Doll said.
UXO Helicopter “flew a completely aquatic survey’ over an area of about 6,600 acres, looking for a World War II bombing target,” Doll said. The target was found, and the sensors also helped “put to bed some of the anecdotal information that suggested there were other types of ranges that may have overlapped in this area.”
Since it was a heavily used recreational area, the Navy wanted to know the extent of ordnance contamination within the survey area.
A DoD environmental program commissioned the program to do a demonstration in New Mexico.
“They buried 110 ordnance items in a 100-acre site and then we flew the site–we didn’t know where those things were, of course–then we sent them a lit of the anomalies we found and we detected 109 out of 110 items,” Bell said. The mean distance from the location we gave them to the actual was about a third or a meter–about a foot.”
This year, UXO Helicopter will be working using internal Battelle R&D funds, he said. “We’re continuing tweaking one of the EM systems to adapt it to a different application altogether. We’re going to keep moving the technology forward.”
UXO helicopter also will apply the technology to DoD sites in the United States.
Bell said the next step is putting it on a UAV. Battelle is also looking at “a variation on this system that combines both types of sensors and detects both types of data in one pass, because that gives you more information.” There’s some extrapolation of what we’re doing to the offshore deepwater problem.
Until now, the focus has been on ordnance detection, Bell said.
However, both said there are other applications, such as archeology or mineral prospecting. For example, UXO Helicopter has done a diamond prospecting survey, showing that a helicopter can produce data as good or perhaps even better than the more typical high altitude flights.
“The surveys that we do are principally geared towards a situation that somebody has uncovered and they need to intervene for human health and safety reasons, so we conduct these surveys to help them determine number one, if something is there, and number two, the extent of it,” Bell said.
So far, they said, more than 35 sites and more than 65,000 acres have been surveyed.