Slashdot Mirror
Flexible Body Armor
dotmax writes "One item to pop out of the Turin Winter Olympics is the use of flexible body armor. Similar to silly putty, this shear rate material is flexible under normal load and hardens under impact. Sounds expensive, but could offer some great alternatives for traditional hard shelled impact gear in active sports and military applications."
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Since it only hardens on impact, could it also be used in hand weaponry?
"Honest, officer, we just came across him and he was beaten to a pulp. You can search us, go ahead, we ain't got nothin' but our gym towels..."
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I might be impressed, but only if it uses a Holtzman Fields somehow....
Does it harden just right around the area of impact, or a larger overall surface as to actually deaden the blow? If it just hardens around the area of impact then it isn't much help.
any particular reason these suits vaguely resemble that of spiderman's?
could this be some geek-inventor's (redundant, i know) idea of making his childhood dream of being a superhero come true?
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
*Disclaimer: May be exaggerated
The things that happen when struck by a bullet or shrapnel are different than a skier hitting the ground. This material could perhaps help to make the impact plates, but the actual stopping of the penetration will likely need "normal means"
Now when spies want to copy documents, they can just tear off a piece of their armor and press it against the pages.
In other news, 98% of women polled can't wait until they start making condoms out of this stuff.
But Phil Green, research director at d3o Labs, says it is difficult to precisely measure the material's properties because the hardening effect only last as long as the impact itself.
Certainly a researcher could take a sample of this material and strike it with increasing force using a material with known hardness. That might get them an answer beyond: "we don't know." I'm skeptical of this material's utility in a military application. Particularly as body armor against high velocity bullets and shrapnel. Woven carbon and Kevlar seem still unmatched in its capacity to take a high impact round. But, like I said, an assault riffle and a material sample could answer that question in minutes...
Sounds like gel suit armor. Let's hope you like your suits personality.
is it made out of silly putty? too bad it didn't save allison forsyth's knee
?giS
Impact armour.
That's why there's another topic of research dealing with shear thickening fluid. I particularly like Norman Wagner's research here. Basically, we could make full body armor, but the number of layers of kevlar required is too many to make it very flexible or breathable. This is helping to solve that while keeping or improving the protection.
I do a lot of inline skating and I can see where this stuff could be revolutionary for outdoor inlining, skateboarding, etc.
Personally, I don't wear pads because they're uncomfortable. I do wear a helmet and palm sliders, which are supposed to help keep your palms from getting skinned up in an actual fall by serving as a buffer between your palms and the asphalt. In theory, they work pretty good. When you fall going upwards of 30MPH, they aren't a lot of help. Once you hit the ground, even if you initially brace with your palms, momentum is pretty much going to send you wherever it wants.
Being able to wear a long sleeved shirt or pants made of this stuff to help protect the knees and elbows would be huge. I have a road rash spot on my elbow now from a fall last weekend. Granted I don't fall much.. that was the first time in over a year I've had a crash and it was a very minor crash but even still, I'd probably wear this stuff for safety if it was available and not terribly bulky. Most inliners who are serious wear skin suits or jerseys so substituting this stuff would pretty much have no downsides as long as, like I said, it wasn't too bulky.
On the flip side, most skateboarders want to look "extreme" so this stuff might not be a huge hit with them. I personally like my skin intact, however.
Looks like they use a Non-Newtonian fluid, that's the type of material that has these properties.
This was one of the cooler demonstration in my HS chemistry class, the teacher made up a big batch of water + corn starch, and was playing with it like mud, squishing it around and whatnot. Then he beat the hell out of it, and it just sat there and didn't splash, it looked (and sounded) like it was a solid sheet. It was odd to see something that was very dynamic under low force, but static under high force.
It's like a seatbelt, if you yank it hard it locks up, but if you pull gently it will extend.
It seems to have the same properties to custard powder, so it you want to know what its like you can play with it yourself... it does sound like a more practicle set up though, also if it could stop a bullet it would be useful to put under body armour (and could go over the head)... the only problem is the impact which would break all the bones in that area... hmm, could even be worse than a through and through...
anywho, about the custard, if you mix custard powder with water (I'm not sure of exact quantities) you can make a substance which is liquid and you can move your hand through but if you puntch it it'll go hard and your hand won't be able to get through it... you can also make it into a ball and then hold it in your hand and watch it melt... tis cool.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
The original bullet-resistant vest was flexible. It was made of powdered glass, flexible until hit hard, at which point it would stiffen up and spread the force of the impact.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Having rigid plates even on parts of the body that flex less is bulky and cumbersome. Flexible armour is a great concept - far less noticable in normal conditions than some of the rigid ski body armour solutions e.g. Dainese
BTW For the pseudo science and some nice pictures of 'molecules' see the 3DO website
I've had this technology since puberty. More of a weapon, though.
and implied it had a future as military body armor, then a researcher stated that no one knew exactly how tough the material was because it was difficult to test. That was the part I quoted, and then responded to.
"Similar to silly putty"
If it were more like Flubber (if you remember this you are an old geek) the projectiles would bounce back at the source.
I lost my sig...
Dune is never offtopic.
--sincerely, someone other than the poster
Louis Wu unavailable for comment.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
This sounds like it would be perfect for use in motorcycle jackets and suits, assuming it's also reasonably abrasion resistant. Anyone have any idea if this stuff would pass muster for CE certification?
I'm thinking about how the material becomes rigid - how do you get guys to put on a condom that then has to be hit with a hammer?
Well, I guess some men would like it (shudder).
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
We played with cornstarch and water when I was in school too. The teacher called it Oobleck. It was our job to scientifically test the substance and try to determine what it was. That's exactly what I thought about when I read this article.
It was really cool, it was gooey and would flow easily. They we would slam it down on a desk and it would crack, then flow back together. I'm not sure what would cause these properties, do we have a chemist in the house who would care to explain?
...just pick out your favorite newspaper cartoon, press the armor on it, and presto! You're riding into battle with your favorite character. Forget "Death From Above". Nothing says combat like Peanuts or Foxtrot.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
However, Green believes it may be possible to alter the properties of d3o for new impact-protection and anti-trauma applications. "There are certainly opportunities to dabble with the chemistry and enhance the effect," Even if it can't stop bullets right now, the future may be a diffrent storey. The article also says they haven't been able to find a way to adaquately test it's hardness yet. It would be interesting to see the results of a test involving d3o and a 9mm round. Even if it dosn't stop something like a 30-30. or a .762, it would still be better than Kevlar because of the vast improvement in flexability.
Someone save me from this sanity.
I've been meaning to upgrade my Batsuit.
This isn't magic and it isn't some kind of mechanical device.
It is chemistry. The entire suit will not become a concrete coccoon because you tap him on the back.
Rather, the area near where you hit, so the shoulder and maybe part of the neck and arm and upper torso,
that is the only part that would harden. Furthermore, it will soften up again soon as the slap is over.
Though that would be cool if the whole thing became a concrete shell instantly. That would probably
help in more catastrophic crashes.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
Talk about clever marketing -- maybe they found some drunk shroud tourists to run around in their material. I'd be FAR more impressed if real athletes at the Torino Olympics were wearing this stuff.
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
That reminds me a lot of Thinkgeek's Smart Mass Thinking Putty. Any connection ?
Larry Niven featured this concept in sci-fi in Ringworld (1970) - he called it 'Impact Armor' as I recall. Was he the first? Can anyone reference an earlier prediction of this technology?
A-Bomb
...and frankly, this flexible armor sounds great. The reason you want some kind of protection is that you (sometimes in speed events, very often in slalom) run into gates (the plastic poles stuck in the snow that you have to turn around) with various parts of your body. Since you are going fast, and you are wearing a thin aerodynamic racing suit, it hurts like hell. So, if you don't feel like getting hurt, you strap on some plastic shin and arm guards, sort of like an Ancient Greek warrior with his greaves. Anyway, these plastic guards really are not the ideal solution. They chafe (since you are strapping them on tight, and the muscles and skin under the straps are constantly moving). They limit your motions quite a bit. They are, frankly, uncomfortable. And if you are doing speed events, they kill your aerodynamics.
So, as far as I am concerned, flexible armor is totally the way to go. Hopefully FIS won't ban it.
Why would the Pentagon buy American troops more expensive body armor, just because it works better, when they don't even buy the cheaper stuff that's better than nothing? Maybe a few $BILLION for the defense contractors to "test" it, but none to actually support our troops in the line of fire.
--
make install -not war
I want to get all my underwear made out of this stuff. That way I'll never have to wear a cup for sports.
It would also help for when I want to be impertinent to feminists.
It may not stop bullets, but it could make riot shields outdated if you're now invulnerable to Riot Rocks. Though I'd question how much it would help against a molotov. Dunno, but if it were me putting my life on the line, I'd want any protection offered to me.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
FWIW, this stuff sounds like what happens to a semi-liquid mix of cornstarch and water. Slide your hand in and it drops into the fluid; hit it hard and no penetration at all.
That's oobleck you mean.
"Trigger Rigid" armor. Right out of the book. John Brunner was the 1960s answer to Jules Verne.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I think people are getting the wrong impression here. This is put into suits for slalom and super G athletes. It's not to protect you from a fall, but to protect you from the flags that whip you when you go around them. It's not going to save you when you crash into a tree. It's going to stop you from getting bruises on your arms and legs when you hit the flags.
:-) )
Cool idea. But probably not particularly practical in other applications (maybe useful for kendo??? -- but the armour's way cool, so why change
Nobody reads the old classics any more... "Stand on Zanzibar", by John Brunner - a book very much worth reading.
At any rate, like the book mentions in passing... just make a glove out of this material. I think the book's version was a half-glove (covering the palm and only part of the fingers) so you can do delicate work with your hands, but if you threw a fist or simply chopped... instant brass knuckles at the point of contact.
Depending on how good this material is, a full body suit may be incredibly useful in a hand-to-hand combat situation, for anyone using a "hard" martial art - karate, kickboxing etc. Less so for "soft" martial arts like Judo and Aikido, I suppose. And if you can improve it some, it might make bullet proof clothing more comfortable (today's vests are a pain).
So, definitely coming soon to a black ops armoury near you... I don't know about Wall-Mart though. Give it a decade or two.
I could imagine stuff like this acting like a fluid and work better than traditional plate armor. It would definitely be an interesting experiment.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
First, protective gear is useless for downhill skiing since you don't to hit anything as it will slow you down. And if you fall, you want to be as loose as possible to avoid injuries. All you'll hit is a set of nets anyway. For GS skiing this might be usefull for arm and thigh pads but the protective padding actually used already does the job. For SL this would be useless too as molded shin pads do an awesome job. They don't get in the way and you never think about them during you runs. I would be very surprised a racer would express a strong interest for that product. I race and I really don't feel any need for this. On the other hand, as previously stated this could be extremely usefull for other sports and activities, but not skiing.
For body armor purpses: .0004 (four ten-thousands) of an inch into me. In the same time the armor hardens in an circle with a radius of .0004in (For the sake of arguement a very thin bullet). In the next millionth of a second the bullet travels an additional .0004 of an inch into the target. The armor now also has a circle of .0008in in diameter. The affected area starts to grow rather quickly.
The material's reaction time is probably related to how fast the shock-wave of the hit travels through the material. For the sake of arguement: The of the impact shockwave travels through the suit at the same speed sounds travels in water (sound is a shockwave). So it travels roughly 1482 m/s. So the shockwave would take roughly 0.0001 seconds to travel across my entire chest. Modern bullets can travel roughly the same speeds. In that same 0.0001 seconds a bullet would be several inches behind me.
So here comes the messy part: Can this kind of stuff protect a person from gunfire?
So a bullet hits a person wearing this stuff. In the first 10^-6 of a second the bullet travels
Time Depth/Shockwave Area Affected
0.000050: 0.2000: 0.1256637061
0.000100: 0.4000: 0.5026548246
0.000150: 0.6000: 1.1309733553
0.000200: 0.8000: 2.0106192983
0.000250: 1.0000: 3.1415926536
0.000300: 1.2000: 4.5238934212
0.000350: 1.4000: 6.1575216010
0.000400: 1.6000: 8.0424771932
0.000450: 1.8000: 10.1787601976
In the time it takes the bullet to travel 1 inch into the body enough of the armor has hardened to cover 3 square inches of the target's body. Now the bullet has to deform or move that much more material in order to continue its trip in. Most likely the person could end up with a weird dent in their body where the bullet hit. This is of course dependant upon when the material fails and stops giving protection and how fast the shockwave travels through the material.
Considering that though: I'd rather have a dent in my body then a hole.
Currently the ski suits are used to protect against impacts against relatively flexible things at speeds above sixty miles per hour. So for the athletes to approve of it, it has to work pretty quickly and revert pretty quickly. You are in contact with gates for hundredths of a second and if the armor/fluid reacts fast enough for the athletes to notice and approve, you know the army is going to buy a suit and shoot at it to see what the results are going to be. Imagine the next round of (Disposable) ceramic armor plates that is sent to the troops in Iraq is coated in that stuff and it improves survivability.
Hell, coat the inside of the flak vests in the stuff and have it sent to the firing range for testing. The army always loves things that do the following: improved force protection with less weight. While the army is a giant monolithic beuracracy it does actually get things done once in a while.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
I guess it wouldn't do for helmet padding, which compresses to suck up the force that would otherwise go to the head. (Easier to buy a new helmet than a new head.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If you get hit in a current body armor vest (SWAT, police, etc, military armor is another ball of wax), odds are on that you will get a couple of broken ribs when your vest soaks up the bullet. But then you have a couple of broken ribs and can heal up. The other option is not as fun.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Inflexible means that all the energy gets quickly trasnferred to the contact points of whatever is inflexible. Flexible means some energy is being stored in the deformation of the flexible material and gets released as the material goes back in shape.
I can't seem to find the article right now, but I remember reading about researchers who were looking at incorporating non-newtonian fluids like this into kevlar jackets. The material was basically cosmetic wax mixed with nano-silicate particles, and became solid under pressure. When you worked the material into a fabric it would act as armor, and what better fabric to work it into than kevlar. Most bullet-proof jackets are not entirely kevlar, and have solid plates over critical areas. The preliminary tests done showed that if you worked this material into the kevlar, you could get rid of the plates, and almost half the thickness, and it would offer the same protection as current jackets. Alternately, you could keep the thickness and improve the level of protection.
Obligatory: That is what I recall from reading, human memory is not perfect.
That would be a mistake they only made once!
. .. ..
It is not the kevlar that is a problem but the metal (or ceramic) plates use in the vest. If it is possible to make a suit with kevlar layered over the d3o, it would make current body armour obsolete.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
The only benefit of a hard material in protective clothing is to prevent piercing injuries. I'd say that the risk of piercing injuries in skiing is remote. For sports where a non-piercing, high-force / high speed impact must be projected against you use clothing containing materials which crumple, absorbing the impact and reducing the force imparted to the wearers body. A company providing this material to a skier and promoting it in this way is generating FUD.
Kinda cool, but what is the point of scaleable soundproofing? If you want something to be soundproof, why would it need to ever increase or decrease sound proofability? Why not just make it as soundproof as possible from the start?
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
This kind of thing could be handy in many hazardous environments (possibly including just big cities 8-) ) where it would be desirable for something that repels the stabbing knife, thrown stone, or whatnot... It would be handy for avoiding injury if one were attacked also with fists or the like. If your clothing were made this way, it might blunt many threats.
The current versions are unlikely to stop bullets or give invulnerability to knives, but they might make some attacks less deadly. Also if one were in an auto collision, might not such garb keep one a bit safer? If it were widely used, some airbags might be less important. Considering that the explosive there is considered a major pollutant, that is another possible advantage.
I personally like my skin intact, however.
You know, pads might help with that. I find them much less uncomfortable than road rash.
However, d3o could be very useful in non-military bullet proof vests. Currently, a round can be stopped by kevlar but it still penetrates the body and effectively immobilizes whoever gets hit. A layer of d3o could help dissipate the energy over a larger area and prevent serious damage as a result of an impact. Police officers could greatly benefit from such a product.
You could probably pull that off by adding a CO2 canister inside. When the catastrophic impact occurs, pressure over the suit increases via the CO2, which causes the suit to become hard everywhere.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
This reminds me of something a teacher showed us in school a long time ago!
t s/a/cornflour.htm
Take as much cornflour as you can get your hands on, and apply about the same amount of water then mix... you'll end up with a paste that is liquid if you pour it, and solid if you punch it.
http://physics.about.com/od/fluidphysicsexperimen
From TA:
"Phil Green, research director at d3o Labs, says it is difficult to precisely measure the material's properties because the hardening effect only last as long as the impact itself."
So put something soft (like putty or a melon) under it, whack it with a pole, remove the armor and see how much damage was done. Repeat with other types of armor for comparison.
The article doesn't mention military applications at all.
Combined with those hydraulic leg braces that were posted a few months ago (the ones that let the user carry like an extra 200 lbs - for about 5 minutes), this will bring us one step closer to making Fallout style "Power Armor" a reality!
Let us assume that you are about to be shot in the chest with a 12 gauge 3.5" super-magnum slug, which is overkill for anything short of a bear, or maybe a truck. Let's also assume that you have the option of either wearing the thinnest vest that will stop that slug or nothing at all.
If you wear the vest then when the slug hits it'll dump all it's energy into your chest. You'll sustain massive blunt trauma on the level of getting smacked with a sledgehammer. Lots of broken ribs, lots of bruising, possibly some organ damage and internal bleeding, if you're hit near the heart maybe death.
If you DON'T wear the vest then the slug enters the front of your chest, dumps part of it's energy into your tasty meats, exits your back, and continues on it's way into whatever was behind you. It breaks any ribs it hits near, creates a big ol' permanent cavity through whatever organs are in the way, and paints the wall behind you a lovely shade of red.
I don't know about you, but I think I'll take my chances with the vest TYVM. If I could get the vest lined with some of this stuff to help soak up some of the blow then even better.
Used to play with stuff like this when I was a kid.
Mix corn starch and water together ( heavy on the Corn Starch).
The stuff is solid as a rock when sudden force is applied but
freely flows in the absence of resistence.
What great fortune for rulers that men do not think.
Corn starch has the same property... If you mix it with water, it'll be a gooey paste when it's not moving, but you can pick it up and roll it into a ball, and as long as you keep rolling it, it'll firm up... as soon as it stops moving, it turns back into goo...
sounds like corn starch and water to me
Bah, Hiro had this stuff a long time ago --
"Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel:
feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books."
--
This is a material which changes it's properties depending on HOW FAST you try to deform it. Specifically, this material is capable of changing from a soft, gooey phase, to a rigid, hard phase instantly just because you attempt to deform the material more quickly than the rate at which the gooey to rigid transformation occurs.
If perfected, this material could be a soft lining to a vest which moves easily with the wearer, but hardens over a large area when struck with a high-speed object such as a bullet, thus spreading out the energy of the impact.
As a sports protector, this material could be soft over your shins or arms (or whole body, like the body-bag style motorcycle suit), but stiffen on impact when you fall, and the rate of stiffening and the ultimate stiffness could be large enough such that it is just as effective as a hard, heavy guard over your shin/arm which spreads out the load over a big enough area so that you are not injured at all.
As another poster correctly points out, this is the big motha of non-newtonian fluids.
If perfected, this could be the ultimate in comfort for the given protection level.
great. I can see someone using that to create a new device to deal with impotence. Like we don't have enough already. Pills, shots, pumps, etc....WTF do we have so many advertisements for remedies a limp dick? The Baby Boomers need to cope with the fact that they're getting old and stop being so sex obsessed. Every other generation before them dealt with the fact that getting a hard on is more difficult with age. They need to grow up.
By contrast, the downhill and slalom skiers continue to seem dated in throwback jumpsuits that are less ironically Old School than old, with the sad gauche quality of the 70's ski wear one still sees at places like St. Moritz. With their shinguards and awkward pinnies, with their ham thighs vacuum-packed into Lycra jumpsuits printed with spider webs, the American ski team seems stylistically linked to the days of Spider Sabitch, who made the Web his signature motif.
Actually my local SCA group is trying to contact the makers of the armor to see if we can get our hands on a suit of the stuff for our heavy combat. We'd still use traditional metal armor over the suit, but the advantages for full coverage over areas where armor is light or perhaps missing due to a malfunction are considerable.
Basicaly if it'll protect a skier zipping downhill and whacking into a fiberglass pole, then it ought to help a SCAdian against another chap with bit of a stick.
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
"look mammy, I got a new floppy sword", and bam, her head in on the ground!
Seriously, this stuff would be awesome for paintball armor.
Perhaps it'll work as padding for the armor plates to reduce the bruises caused by a bullet hitting the armor plate?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I hope this one will be stronger than the one we have seen in Chaplin'a "The Great Dicator" movie along with that new parachute model.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
It's not a Brand New Invention, just an improvement on things that have been known for a long time. I, for example, learned the word - thixotropic - from my boss 35 years ago, when I worked in a chenical/ceramic research lab.
mark
I heard about this kind of armor 10 years ago. Only it was found in high-priced motorcycle clothing. One of my friends had just bought a new zoom-splat, and was excited buy the new "geek biker" clothes he had also bought. The jacket and gloves he bought had a similar putty inside them that would harden on impact. We offered to test the system by beating on him with a bat, but he declined. -Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Yup, you guessed. I'm going to grumble. I submitted this story 3 DAYS AGO and had it rejected:
Armor for the Olympic skier Wednesday February 15, @12:43PM Rejected
Not only was the story rejected but the one which has now been accepted, 3 DAYS LATE, is the same story!
Keep up the good work folks. I'm sure someday we'll see stories about that new operating system that is all the rage. You know the one I mean. Windows 95.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Just a quick correction. .762 would imply caliber, which would make it just over 3/4 of an inch in diameter. In other words, HUGE. I'm pretty sure there is nothing that would stop a round like that. Even if it did exist, the impact of such a round would probably just about liquify your insides. The parent post was, I'm sure, refering to a 7.62mm round. The diameter used by the AK-47. The most common example of a 7.62mm diameter round would be a .308.
Just a note. Not a bash on the parent as he probably just misplaced the decimal point.