Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea ISSN:1229-3059(Print) 2287-2302(Online) 한국전산구조공학회 논문집

Survivability of soldiers has been greatly threatened by the development of thermal observation device(TOD). Therefore, infrared, especially thermal, stealth technology is applied to combat suit to avoid detection from TOD. In this study, prior to the thermal camouflage performance evaluation of combat suit, thermal signature characteristic from clothed the human body was analyzed considering the realistic condition for human surface temperature compared to that from unclothed human body. To get the realistic surface temperature distribution of human, thermoregulation and multi-layer skin structure model is applied to the human model. Based on temperature distribution, surface diffuse radiance in thermal range is calculated and by assuming the background conditions, contrast radiance intensity(CRI) characteristic of human body is analyzed. By wearing clothing, the CRI between background and human body became reduced in low emissive background but in high emissive background, the contrast is much more prominent. Therefore, this issue should be considered in design process of thermal camouflage combat suit.