An Experimental Study on Water Curtain Cooling and Infrared Concealment Effects

Abstract

The water curtain spray system of the ship helps reduce surface thermal load and lowers thermal infrared radiation, notably enhancing the stealth and survivability of naval ships. The performance of the water curtain spray system is largely influenced by the density of the nozzles and their installation height. Therefore, a test platform was established to investigate these critical influencing factors, employing an orthogonal design methodology for the experimental study. Specifically, the study evaluated the effects of varying distances to the steel plate target and different injection heights on the cooling performance of the system. Results demonstrate that using one nozzle per 4 square meters of the ship’s surface area effectively lowers the surface temperature, bringing it closer to the ambient background temperature. This nozzle configuration creates irregular infrared heat patterns, which complicate the task for infrared detectors to discern the ship’s outline, thus enhancing its infrared stealth. Additionally, maintaining the nozzle installation height within 0.6 m to prevent the temperature difference between the steel plate and the background temperature from exceeding 4 K. Moreover, as the infrared imaging distance increases from 3 to 9 m, the temperature difference measured by the thermocouple and the infrared imager increases by 141.27%. Furthermore, with the increase in infrared imaging distance, the infrared temperature of the target steel plate approaches the background temperature, indicating improved detectability. These findings have significantly enhanced the stealth capabilities of naval ships, maximizing their immunity to infrared-guided weapon attacks. Moreover, their importance in improving the survivability of ships on the water surface cannot be underestimated.

Keywords

Ship water curtain stealth / Water curtain nozzles / Water curtain cooling / Infrared shielding / Infrared stealth

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Harbin Engineering University and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature