Sandia is an acknowledged authority in providing systemic solutions to protecting military forces and their assets, both on bases and on the move.
Across decades, Sandia’s innovative research and development on explosives have pioneered new capabilities to meet new threats. We are actively working to counter explosive threats such as domestic improvised explosive devices (IEDs). We have evaluated the feasibility of creating explosives from commercially available precursors, characterized liquid explosives using both experimental and computational approaches, and have developed and evaluated detectors for this new class of explosives mixtures.
We are helping the military reduce vulnerability to deadly explosives attacks by analyzing the problem as an end-to-end system. In other words, we examine the entire chain of events that leads to a suicide bomb attack, from the time an adversary conceives the plan until the attack occurs.
Interdisciplinary approaches, unique explosive test capabilities, and sound modeling have added further to the value of these technically solid and time-critical studies.
Our country learned from the 9/11 attacks on America and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina that an obvious need exists to develop a communications system that would allow federal, state and local jurisdictional entities to stay informed in a secure and authenticated manner. Taking on the challenge, Sandia and experienced partners have designed a demonstration technology called Trusted Data Sharing Architecture that provides secure, scalable, and interoperable data sharing within and among differing agencies.
Trusted Data Sharing utilizes a standards-based Service Oriented Architecture that provides
The ever-present possibility of terrorist attacks on persons and facilities is addressed within active defense. “Vertical threats” are any incoming ballistic or guided round or air platform ranging from mortars to missiles to aircraft.
Active Defense assesses specific potential targets and evaluates the risks from different vertical threats. Once the threats are identified for a particular asset, mitigation strategies can then be considered and evaluated.
Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a major concern within the engineering community. Many aerospace structures are operating well beyond their intended design lives. The costs associated with the increasing maintenance and surveillance needs of national infrastructure and military systems are rising at an unsustainable rate. Decreasing maintenance costs while increasing readiness rates/identifying safety-related issues early is crucial.
Sandia improves airworthiness and operational effectiveness by applying our expertise in advanced Non- Destructive Inspection, structural health monitoring, and the testing and validation of advanced materials and requirements.
