Has anyone tried something like sprayed concrete layers (e.g. shotcrete) as a method for dealing with landmines? Would you be able to put enough material over top to dampen their effects sufficiently?
Finding them first is the real problem.
And presumably waiting for it to set and cure, and being massive enough that you didn’t just spray fine silicious dust and cement chunks over everything is the second problem.
And the logistics of getting a cement mixer onto site and working, because land mines travel in packs would be a third.
What about a superglue type mist to spray into the mechanism?
You want to know if firing concrete at high velocity from a short range- high enough velocity that the impact created by the application consolidates the concrete - at an explosive device designed to detonate when it is subjected to pressure would be a good idea?
Sure, the only drawback I can see from an alternative of having people jump up and down on landmines to clear them is that the concrete is going to provide add to the shrapnel effect.
You’re talking about paving over hundreds, if not thousands of square miles of ground. It’s not exactly practical.
Yep. And there have been some… um… interesting… detection methods that people have been experimenting with, such as training bees to associate the scent of explosives with food, and then turning the bees loose and seeing where they go. Rats and dogs have also been trained to seek explosives.
Another method that they have been experimenting with is flying over areas that possibly contain mines and spraying those areas with seeds from genetically modified plants that change color in the presence of explosives. Wait for the plants to grow then fly over the areas again and look for the color change.
Seems to work in various video games, but I couldn’t find a real-world reference for it.
Heavily armored vehicles equipped with either metal chain flails or some sort of tiller system seems to work the best. Another method that is being experimented with is to set off rocket fuel (literally - they use leftover fuel from the space shuttle project) next to the mine and use the thermal energy to melt the mine and destroy it. There are also bangalore-type explosives similar to the long tubes used in Saving Private Ryan that use the concussive force of the explosives to set off any mines in the area.
Just to note, these methods are very effective at breaching minefields, but can make clearing them more difficult. The distinction is that the goal of breaching a minefield is to clear a (relatively) safe path through which to pass vehicles and personnel while they are under fire, so the number one priority in making said path after making it relatively free of mines is that it be done as fast as possible.
The goal of mine clearing in the humanitarian sense is to remove all the mines after the war is over so that the land is safe to use. Creating lanes with explosives, chains, plows and flails tends to result in some of the mines being dislodged but not exploded. If - and this is admittedly a big if - the locations of the mines in the fields had been properly recorded by whomever laid them as is required by international laws and customs going back even before the Ottawa ban on anti-personnel land mines and the records of where and how they were laid survives the war, the mines are no longer going to be where they were when they were laid.
That’s like saying that if you want to cross from San Francisco to Oakland, you need to create a platform that covers every inch of the Bay.
My understanding is that mines are engineered for specific purposes. If you want an anti-personelle mine then it’s going to trigger with a relatively light weight and it’s going to explode big enough to take out a group of humans. If you want an anti-tank mine, then it needs several tens of tons on top, and it will produce a very big boom.
In the former case, a vehicle designed to spray would probably be armored enough to not care. In the latter case, by the time you get tens of tons of pressure added to that one spot, you’d have a floor of concrete that’s a couple meters deep. I’d be skeptical that it could blast through that and, more importantly, I’d doubt that you need to flood it that deeply because as you add more material above the device, the weight of anything on top will be distributed over a much wider area.
Whether that is true or not, I don’t know.
Plausibly, there may be some better material than concrete for the purpose. You need something that can bear the weight of military equipment, gets high enough to distribute load over a sufficiently wide surface area, and would be resistant to explosives.
You can see the bay,
The landmines are hidden.
If you’re talking about fields of pure anti-tank mines, you’re making one hell of a mess with concrete for no good reason; they can be cleared by hand. More to the point, you’re paving over places and leaving landmines buried underneath them. How is that clearing them? You’re just dotting the countryside with random concrete blobs. Oh, and the roads that anti-tank land mines tend to be placed on, making the roads kind of unusable until you decide to take a jackhammer to the concrete blobs with high explosives buried in them.
In the real world, the fact that anti-tank mines won’t detonate until you have vehicle pressure on top of them is why you don’t make minefields purely out of anti-tank mines but instead mix them with anti-personnel mines to prevent them from just being dug up and picked up to clear them. Oh, and add anti-handling and anti-tampering devices to them.
Add to that you’re grossly overestimating the amount of pressure needed to set off an anti-tank mine; they don’t need to have ‘several tens of tons’ on top of them to set them off. They don’t care about total weight; all they need is sufficient pressure applied to them. Your average tank actually has less psi than your average car because the weight is distributed over the entire area covered by the caterpillar tracks rather than being place on four wheels. This is also why you can drive tanks cross country, but not your typical passenger car.
| Object | Ground pressure (kPa) | (psi) |
|---|---|---|
| Hovercraft | 0.7 | 0.1 |
| Human on snowshoes | 3.5 | 0.5 |
| Rubber-tracked ATV | 5.165 | 0.75 |
| Wheeled ATV | 13.8 | 2 |
| Diedrich D-50 – T2 drilling rig | 26.2 | 3.8 |
| Human male (130 kg, standing on one foot) | 55 | 8 |
| Average human, flat shoes[5] | 17 | 2.5 |
| M1 Abrams tank[6] | 103 | 15 |
| 1993 Toyota 4Runner / Hilux Surf | 170 | 25 |
| Adult horse (550 kg, 1250 lb) | 170 | 25 |
| Bagger 288 excavation machine | 170 | 25 |
| Passenger car | 205 | 30 |
d9aofhlazy6tza55quzq.png (1775×999) (kinja-img.com)
See the field behind the men? See the pile of landmines they have collected so far?
Now imagine trying to spray/squirt/ pour cement over that area.
It’s not only impractical, it would be a really terrible idea.
You’d be paving over your farmland, making it impossible to grow anything on it. And even for areas that aren’t farmland: you’d be making permeable surfaces, which absorb and hold rainfall, into impermeable surfaces, which do neither. The result of too much land in impermeable surface is both flood, because rain can’t soak in so runs off all at once; and drought, because the water wasn’t absorbed for slow release in dry periods.
Even if all you do is pave a patch in every spot where you think there’s a mine: fields will still be rendered untillable and unsuitable for modern farming, and the total area rendered impervious may well add up to enough to do significant damage.
If I need to go through a dark room with thumbtacks on the floor, I only need to know where the other door is, not where the thumbtacks are, in order to lay down sheet pans to step on.
If you have a mitigating measure, the thing being mitigated’s location isn’t terribly important.
Are there practical ways to detect the mines underground using metal detectors, radar, acoustic imaging, or any other non-destructive means? Remote controlled vehicles, maybe even flying vehicle could operate close to the ground to conduct these operations. Once the locations are known I assume they could be detonated in place, maybe even with ‘shotcrete’. Also, if possible, removed using remote controlled machines.
And thus, roads were never built outside of cities.
Mine sweeping is not a terribly useful activity if it’s on contested land, that’s being watched by people with artillery and snipers rifles and who will just come in and add new mines any time you remove one.
Your first step is to travel through the minefield, so that you can capture the territory and hopefully one day have the freedom to leisurely go minesweeping.
One cubic inch of concrete weighs 0.087 lbs. To get to 15 pounds, you would need 172 inches (14.3 feet) deep of concrete.
I’m not sure how to calculate the PSI applied at a certain point buried under concrete, based on something moving on top but I’d expect that there’s some sort of conic load distribution.
Of course there are. Ground penetrating radar and infrared imaging are two of them. There are no doubt others.