Aerospace, Military and Defence
Ensuring resilience in air force base infrastructure
By Paul Currie, director, MPE Ltd T
he resilience of power systems against interruption or damage caused by hostile electromagnetic interference (EMI) and electromagnetic pulse (EMP)
threats is nowhere more important than in critical defence infrastructure such as air force bases.
High-performance protection filters with high reliability address the demands for resilience – as well as compliance with exacting military standards – and have become mandatory in the interests of national security.
High performance means the achievement of high insertion losses across the full frequency
spectrum. MPE’s power line filters provide very high insertion loss performance (dB against frequency in Hz) across the full frequency spectrum from Very Low Frequency (VLF) to Super High Frequency (SHF). Hence their performance in protecting against electrical noise well exceeds the industry benchmarks for say mains supply applications, which can be as high as 100dB in a frequency range across 10kHz to 10GHz.
There has always been a need to ensure effective electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) between disparate systems co-located in an environment congested with equipment, but more recently concerns about resilience have risen to the top of the agenda. In most applications, systems must now be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and operate safely and securely without any interruption in service due to interference.
1200A MPE HEMP filter
Among USAF sites for which MPE has provided its Mil-Std-188-125 HEMP protection filters in recent years in the context of ICBM missile defence have been the northernmost base of the US Air Force – the Thule Airforce Base (AFB) on the north-west coast of Greenland
The Mantis battery-electric towing traverser from Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions
– for its Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) and the Clear AFB in Denali Borough, Alaska. HEMP is the pulse generated by a high- altitude, nuclear type detonation, or from natural phenomena such as geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) from solar storms.
In 2016 the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Engineering and Support Center in Huntsville, Alabama awarded Serco, Inc a five-year, $38 million contract to upgrade and modernise HEMP protection for Thule AFB’s BMEWS system. As part of this
Array of high-performance power line filters from MPE
The relationship of insertion loss (dB) to frequency (Hz), an essential criterion of filter performance 14 March 2023 Components in Electronics
www.cieonline.co.uk
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