Individual Cooling Equipment

Military ground mobility vehicles often operate in areas of high heat with no environmental conditioning systems for cooling the individual soldier or critical vehicle electronic systems. Typical vehicle climate control systems are large refrigerant-based systems that are not man portable. SOCOM expressed a desire for cooling equipment that is man portable for short periods of time (~3 hours) during dismounted operations. Phase I of this effort focused primarily on developing and integrating technologies to document a baseline, personnel and electronics cooling system design that addressed the environmental and physiological challenges of extremely hot conditions. This system had to be be lightweight, low volume, man-portable, free of compressed gas, low power, and capable of cooling on-board communications equipment during mounted operations. This purpose of this Phase II project is to develop Special Operations Forces Individual Cooling Equipment (SOFICE) to meet the challenges of combating heat related injuries due to extreme temperatures when conducting missions.