Nano Terra, Inc. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A17-059

Description

There is a need to replace toxic obscurant smokes with non-toxic alternatives, without sacrificing the efficacy of the obscurant. Nano Terra proposes to formulate non-toxic, hygroscopic materials into smoke formulations that will produce smoke having high mass extinction coefficients. These formulations will produce aerosols with well-defined yield factors, leading to highly efficient smoke generation, all without the use of pyrophoric materials. These visible obscurant formulations can be tuned through the choice of small molecules, oligomers, and encapsulated polymers to achieve the desired control of the growth factor, the viscosity, surface tension, and vapor pressure, all of which will determine the aerosol size, and thereby the efficacy of this material for creating the visible obscurant.