New Delhi. Army technology seminar on common technologies and advanced materials for land systems, with focus on enabling the Indian Army towards 2025 and beyond, was organized in the capital by CII in association with the Indian Army. The one day seminar discussed varied topics with relation to advanced materials for land systems and soldiers. With focus on the application of technology for land forces, a special presentation was made by Mr. Vaibhav Gupta, Director, MKU a leading manufacturer and solution provider for platform protectionwith over30 years of domain experience made a presentation highlighting their capabilities in armour protection focusing on “contemporary and future light weight armour solutions” in composite materials.
Over these years, MKU has provided protection solutions for more than 2000 platforms globally including a wide range of naval vessels, land vehicles and aircrafts. Many of the naval vessels doing duty on the Indian coastline have armour provided by the company.
Weight carried by a soldier is of critical importance as it impacts and hinders his performance and survivability capabilities in the theatre of operation. Modern soldiers carry equipment weighing approx. 36-40 Kgs on them including body armour, ammo, batteries, water, rations and new generation devices needed to fight and survive and of these, body armour is probably the single heaviest item.
On the light weight front, the technologists and designers at MKU have combined the capabilities of new ultra-light weight 6th generation Polyshieldarmour with the versatile and extremely comfortable quick release Instavest. The Instavest is Patent product of MKU.
Until recently there was no reliable way to reduce the resulting trauma of the impacting bullets or fragments on a soldier’s helmet. While he may be able to survive the actual hit, there have been many instances of long-term head injuries due to the resulting trauma in helmets. Mr. Gupta also spoke of MKU’s, Mukut advanced combat helmets, which are made using the revolutionary RHT (Reduced Helmet Trauma) Technology and have been tested and certified by HP White Laboratories, USA to offer a BABT (Behind Armour Blunt Trauma) of less than 10 mm which is over 40% lower than conventional helmets.
Engineers at MKU have developedthe Modular Schutz Technik (MOST), through which it becomes possible to integrate armour panels on board aircrafts without making any structural changes in the design of the platform. This becomes especially critical for armouring of existing platforms. The modularity in MOST, offers helicopter to be armoured in various configuration suited for different kind of operations.In the past the company has provided armour protection for various platforms including Mi-17, Bell, Super Puma, Sikorsky and Black hawk to name a few. Helicopters armoured by the company have seen active service in some of the harshest battlefields of the world.
A number of Indian vehicle programmes are in the pipeline. These include the LAM, LSV, LBPV and the mother of all programs FICV. Over the course of daylong seminar the services and the industry discussed on the configuration of these platforms to meet future threat requirements of the Indian Armed Forces. MKU in the presentation mentioned that the solution for some of the programs already exists and the technical team is working on the development for futuristic platforms like the FICV and the FRCV.
