The arrival of infra red technology on the battlefield has made it necessary to revisit traditional camouflage colours
The reflectance properties of paints, fabrics and other camouflage materials used by Nato are now specified over a wavelength range from 350nm to1200nm, well outside the range of human vision and also outside the range of a conventional UV-visible spectrophotometer.
This means that companies such as Bowmer Bond Narrow Fabrics, which produces fabrics for defence purposes, would either have to invest in expensive UV-vis-NIR instrumentation for QC testing, or send samples out for measurement.
Bowmer Bond did the latter, but the delays involved could be unacceptable in a market where urgency is often paramount.
Now Camspec has developed a special version of its standard M350 UV-visible spectrophotometer for this application. Fitted with an integrating sphere to maximise the collection of the diffuse reflection from the sample surface, the M350N comes with PC software to display the reflectance spectrum over the required range, together with upper and lower specification limits.
Complete with reflectance and wavelength standards, the system is roughly half the cost of the conventional alternative. Bowmer Bond now uses the M350N for quality control on their Nato olive drab and desert brown webbings.
According to Bowmer Bond's Richard Taylor: "It has also speeded up R and D as we don't have to wait to analyse samples.
"This makes Bowmer Bond more attractive to the MOD for development work".
