Real-time DIRCM system modeling

摘要

Directed infrared countermeasures (DIRCM) play an increasingly important role in electronic warfare to counteract threats posed by infrared seekers. The usefulness and performance of such countermeasures depend, for example, on atmospheric conditions (attenuation and turbulence) and platform vibrations, causing pointing and tracking errors for the laser beam and reducing the power transferred to the seeker aperture. These problems make it interesting to simulate the performance of a DIRCM system in order to understand how easy or difficult it is to counteract an approaching threat and evaluate limiting factors in various situations. This paper describes a DIRCM model that has been developed, including atmospheric effects such as attenuation and turbulence as well as closed loop tracking algorithms, where the retro reflex of the laser is used for the pointing control of the beam. The DIRCM model is part of a large simulation framework (EWSim), which also incorporates several descriptions of different seekers (e.g. reticle, rosette, centroid, nutating cross) and models of robot dynamics. Effects of a jamming laser on a specific threat can be readily verified by simulations within this framework. The duel between missile and countermeasure is simulated in near real-time and visualized graphically in 3D. A typical simulation with a reticle seeker jammed by a modulated laser is included in the paper.