Non-lethal weapons and the long tail of warfare

This paper examines whether non-lethal weapons (NLWs) enhance the capability of the US armed forces to conduct irregular warfare (IW) operations. With expectations that the operational environment will only continue to become more complex in the future, NLWs may reduce the level of violence received, as well as dispensed, by US forces while performing tasks in the IW spectrum. We argue that NLWs increase the ability of US forces to address the long tail of warfare and their deployment should be increased in the near term.     

Proactive release procedures for just‐in‐time job shop environments,subject to machine failures

In this paper, we consider just‐in‐time job shop environments (job shop problems with an objective of minimizing the sum of tardiness and inventory costs), subject to uncertainty due to machine failures. We present techniques for proactive uncertainty management that exploit prior knowledge of uncertainty to build competitive release dates, whose execution improves performance. These techniques determine the release dates of different jobs based on measures of shop load, statistical data of machine failures, and repairs with a tradeoff between inventory and tardiness costs. Empirical results show that our methodology is very promising in comparison with simulated annealing and the best of 39 combinations of dispatch rules & release policies, under different frequencies of breakdowns. We observe that the performance of the proactive technique compared to the other two approaches improves in schedule quality (maximizing delivery performance while minimizing costs) with increase in frequency of breakdowns. The proactive technique presented here is also computationally less expensive than the other two approaches. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004     

Effect of metal powders on explosion of fuel-air explosives with delayed secondary igniters

In order to improve the energy level of fuel air explosive(FAE) with delayed secondary igniters, high energetic metal powders were added to liquid fuels mainly composed of ether and isopropyl nitrate. Metal powders' explosive properties and reaction mechanisms in FAE were studied by high-speed video, pressure test system, and infrared thermal imager. The results show that compared with pure liquid fuels, the shock wave overpressure, maximum surface fireball temperature and high temperature duration of the mixture were significantly increased after adding high energetic metal powder. The overpressure values of the liquid-solid mixture at all measuring points were higher than that of the pure liquid fuels. And the maximum temperature of the fireball was up to 1700 ℃, which was higher than that of the pure liquid fuels. After replacing 30％of aluminum powder with boron or magnesium hydride, the shock wave pressure of the mixture was further increased. The high heat of combustion of boron and the hydrogen released by magnesium hydride could effectively increase the blast effect of the mixture. The improvement of the explosion performance of boron was better than magnesium hydride. It shows that adding high energetic metal powder to liquid fuels can effectively improve the explosion performance of FAE.     

抗美援朝战争中志愿军空军培育战斗精神的历史经验

抗美援朝战争中,志愿军空军在敌强我弱的情况下,既发挥高技术武器装备的作用,又重视战斗精神培育,取得了空战的胜利。他们在培育战斗精神中的“五个结合”,即:把思想教育与技术准备、继承传统与空战实践、单独作战与协同作战、学习苏军与军事民主、立功运动与服务保证结合起来的经验,对当前我军战斗精神的培育具有重要的借鉴意义。     

Modeling the operation of multireservoir systems using decomposition and stochastic dynamic programming

Stochastic dynamic programming models are attractive for multireservoir control problems because they allow non‐linear features to be incorporated and changes in hydrological conditions to be modeled as Markov processes. However, with the exception of the simplest cases, these models are computationally intractable because of the high dimension of the state and action spaces involved. This paper proposes a new method of determining an operating policy for a multireservoir control problem that uses stochastic dynamic programming, but is practical for systems with many reservoirs. Decomposition is first used to reduce the problem to a number of independent subproblems. Each subproblem is formulated as a low‐dimensional stochastic dynamic program and solved to determine the operating policy for one of the reservoirs in the system. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2006     

纳米结构炭材料的储放氢性能研究

主要对多种纳米结构炭材料（超级活性炭、多壁碳纳米管,纳米碳纤堆,纳米石墨纤堆、纳米石墨球等）在常温、10-13MPa的氢气压力下的储放氢量进行了测定（其中包括经过一系列物化处理的样品）,井对其结构和比表面积分别采用SEM、TEM、HRTEM、ASAP2010吸附测试仪（BET）进行了分析．实验结果表明：经过处理的纳米碳样品的储放氢量有所提高,但没有一种样品在温和的实验每件下的储放氢量超过1．0wt％,离DOE目标（6．5wt%）相距甚远。