|
Fort Belvoir, VA - Our adversaries are becoming increasingly
skilled in chemical and biological warfare and continue to engineer
new dissemination methods, putting the warfighter and military
operations at risk. To combat this, experts from the Defense Threat
Reduction Agency's Joint Science and Technology Office and the
Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center are getting creative with a
new decontamination System Performance Model (SPM).
Led by
JSTO's Mr. Michael Roberts and ECBC's Dr. Brent Mantooth, the
Contact hazard, Residual hazard, Efficacy, Agent, Test and
evaluation, Integrated and Variable Environment (CREATIVE)
decontamination SPM uses a computer-based modeling approach to
simulate processes. These include contamination, decontamination and
post-decontamination contact when a chemical or biological agent is
present.
Factors such as the scenario, how people interact
with decontaminated materials and the amount of time before
decontamination is initiated all affect potential outcomes of
warfighter and operational safety and are accounted for by the
CREATIVE SPM.
|
July 25, 2016 - The CREATIVE Decontamination System Performance
Model. (Image provided by Mr. Michael Roberts, DTRA Joint Science and
Technology Office)
|
Decontamination involves a complex series of interacting
processes that contribute to post-decontamination hazards such as
vapor emission and contact transfer. Currently, the CREATIVE SPM
uses deterministic physics-based models to simulate contamination,
decontamination and post-decontamination hazards for a wide range of
military materials from traditional and emerging threats. Engineered
with a generation approach, JSTO and ECBC will continually update
CREATIVE SPM to add new threats and implement layers of complexity
over time.
The generation-based approach allows the JSTO and
ECBC teams to address the daunting challenge that each
contaminant-material-decontaminant combination is a unique system
with substantially different responses. The model parameters are not
trivial to determine and most parameters vary with environmental
conditions such as temperature, humidity and wind.
For example, scenarios in confined spaces, such as a vehicle
cabin, with a specific chemical agent may result in high exposures.
If the same agent is dispersed in open-air, lower exposure levels
may be recognized.
In both cases, decontamination would
reduce the source term of the material, but result in different
operational effects. The number of potential scenarios leads to a
continuum of results, making accurate decontamination modeling
difficult.The CREATIVE SPM allows JSTO and ECBC to employ new
technologies by understanding the driving mechanisms behind
decontamination and simulating the conditions that are not safe, not
capable or cost-prohibitive to test.
The JSTO and ECBC team continue to increase computational
capability and efficiency when characterizing and implementing
decontamination kinetics within CREATIVE SPM. Developments will
continue throughout fiscal year 2017 as the team enhances models for
complex military materials to improve the predictive capability for
vapor and contact exposures.
Courtesy Story by
Defense Threat Reduction Agency's Chemical and Biological Technologies Department
(DTRA-CBTD)
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2016
Comment on this article |
