15:03 GMT, October 14, 2009 A mine-sweeping vessel formation of the PLA Navy organized a mine-sweeping exercise in complicated electromagnetic environment in a sea area of the East China Sea in early October. During the exercise, a new-type cutting-and-explosion mine-sweeping device independently developed by China was put into use under close-to-real-war conditions. It’s introduced that the new-type mine-sweeping device has effectively tackled such problems as difficulty in finding mine under the circumstance of low transparency of sea water and difficulty in destroying mine by coordinated efforts of different military strengths. Its function of directly exploding the mine has greatly raised the mine-sweeping operational ability of the troops.

At the exercise site, the officers and men skillfully operated the new-type mine-sweeping device to hunt torpedoes laid by the "enemy". The device would immediately detonate the torpedo with its automatic mine-destroying function once it find a torpedo. And after several seconds of explosion delay, the torpedo was successfully exploded, opening a safe sea-lane.

According to data collected from the exercise site, the use of the new-type mine-sweeping device has raised the demining success rate significantly.


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Wan Fusheng, Yin Junjun