The technical scope of the present invention is that of devices intended to reduce the visible and infrared signatures of military vehicles, with respect to their exhaust and cooling gases.
The evolution of the technologies of cameras and thermal sensors allows heat sources, such as an engine's exhaust and cooling gases, to be detected from great distances in a land environment. To improve stealthiness faced with the evolution of infrared sensors, it is thus necessary to reduce the level of energy radiated by the exhaust and cooling gas flows of military vehicles.
Patent FR-2 776 705 proposes an effective device to uniformly dilute the exhaust gases from a military vehicle. The air is cooled in a cooling area and then blown out by a shuttered outlet. This device, however, suffers from a major drawback. In fact, if the design specifications impose high ballistic performances, the shutters become difficult to produce in thicknesses consistent with the vehicle's architecture. On the contrary, if the mass of the shutters is sought to be reduced, this is detrimental to the ballistic protection of the vehicle. Another drawback lies in the fact that the engine's exhaust and cooling gas flows are often separated and have their own evacuation systems, thereby multiplying the number of shutters, and thus the vehicle's vulnerable points.