14 DAY TRIAL // Many science teams around the globe have worked on creating a viable and portable electromagnetic bomb (e-bomb) over the past few years, one that could easily take out all the electronic systems in a given area, leaving the target dead in the water. However, despite their best efforts, the smallest such devices constructed have been as large as 3.5 meters in length. This has made them impractical for the military applications the Army envisioned for them. Now, researchers at the Texas Tech University (TTU) have designed an e-bomb that is just 15 centimeters in diameter, and 1.5 meters in length.
By all standards, this can be considered a portable weapon, and experts believe that such a device could easily be implemented in aircraft platforms. The specific device created in Texas will have a power of 35 MW, and will emit a microwave beam in the 2-to-6GHz range. This type of beam has the ability to annihilate everything from computer systems to medical equipments, basically everything that is based on transistors, silicon chips, diodes and vacuum tubes. The success of this bomb is not guaranteed by the size of its cargo, but by the fact that it releases its pulse at very high speeds.
“There is really nothing on this whole system that is fundamentally new. The big deal is how to get that thing built small,” TTU Center for Pulsed Power & Power Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering Michael Giesselmann, who has been part of the team that has developed the new device, said. “If HPM weapons were used in Iraq – and I’m not saying they were – they wouldn’t have been near” as small as the TTU devices, Kris Kristiansen, who is the project leader at the Center, added.
The great achievement of the new system is precisely the fact that it manages to pull together some basic elements for an e-bomb, but also to do so in the simplest of manners, while still retaining a large explosive power. “Our system is designed to produce several hundred megawatts at the completion of its development,” Texas Tech Electrical Engineering Professor Andreas Neuber, who has created the core design for the new project, explained. “It’s actually one of the simplest [bombs] you can make,” Giesselmann concluded, as quoted by IEEE.