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Liquid Armor the New Bulletproof Vest
kjh1 writes "Armor Holdings Inc. plans to start selling their 'liquid armor' next year. The new armor, originally envisioned to be spread on like peanut butter, is instead sprayed onto Kevlar in ultrathin coats. From the article: 'it's a mix of polyethylene glycol, a polymer found in laxatives and other consumer products, and nanobits of silica, or purified sand. Together they produce a "sheer-thickening liquid" that stiffens instantly into a shield when hit hard by an object. It reverts to its liquid state just as fast when the energy from the projectile dissipates.'"
But how much would it cost to coat your car in this stuff? And would it give extra protection?
Nope, not if it's your safety you're worried about, rather than the cars. You want the car to deform, so your decelleration slows down. Just like a helmet, you want it to break so you don't.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
But even so, someone using a knife or a bayonet might not be aiming for the area protected by the vest anyway...
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True story: I had a neighbour who just could not grasp this concept. They'd heard about a modern car which had crumpled really badly in a relatively minor accident, writing it off. They'd therefore decided that older cars built like brick outhouses were far "better", because you might still have a car after the accident.
Try as I might, complete with diagrams and models, I could not get across the idea that this was a good thing, and that had the car not done the crumpling, the passengers would have - and who cares if the car's repairable when everyone in it's dead?
You'll still get an impact from the energy alone. You're not thrown back, but certainly hit. I imagine that hundreds of bullets would be enough to cause some quite significant effects anyway. (The total heating alone could be "interesting".)
...but look down. We'd have joined each other in death.
--Dune
1) The 'injured stormtrooper' fan film.
2) What if he shot you in the face?
Just make the whole uniform out of kevlar coated with this stuff. Might not need that many layers before your regular uniform is bullet resistant...
First, wouldn't there is a weight issue to creating a uniform out of kevlar and this stuff? Second, did you see the part in the summary where it says the liquid stiffens quickly when hit by an object? Wouldn't running, jumping, moving your arms rapidly, etc., cause the armor to be stiff, and slow soldier's movements?
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
It most probably would not give additional protection for a car in case of a crash. This material (the liquid is only one component, anyway) is protecting against piercing, not crushing. It can quickly distribute large kinetic energy peaks that are only in one small spot, like a bullet or a knife's point. A truck crashing into your car is something entirely different.
Understanding is a three-edged sword. --Kosh
Just try not to run into any trees or other non-crumple zoned objects.
/Any safety features are irrelevant if you're not wearing a seatbelt.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You'd need to have a high enough amplitude and frequency to cause the goop to shear against itself from the sound; I'm not quite sure, but gut feel says you wouldn't need to immobilize them since you'd be doing horrible things to their skin and organs already.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Not really, polyetylene glycol (PEG) != ethylene glycol.
But anyway, both PEG, and sand are really cheap, so depending on what is published you should be able to make this at home if you are so inclined.
I'd also expect the DuPont company to try to bring this to market - maybe in their auto paints? I'd be willing to bet they provided significant funding based on the fact that the demo utilized kevlar, and that the research was done at the university of delaware.
I wonder how simple this really is, while PEGs vary greatly in molecular weight, and there is an infinite span of concentrations, really, knowing only what the video told us, anyone with an interest should be able to figure it out.
That was my objection to the movie. If you read the book, they all had mobile armour (and not soft, liquid armour either) with jetpacks and were spread about 100 yards apart when in combat. The only thing in that movie had in common with Heinlien's work was the title
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Yes, but (a) the rigid armor is "flexible" in terms of the joints between the plates, and (b) doesn't cover the whole body - whereas presumably this would be shirt, trousers, the lot. The parent's question was whether they could run in the liquid armor... IE the video states that the liquid solidifies when agitated - are the forces of running enough to trigger the solidification? What about with full battle kit slapping around on your back? Or when you slip in what's left of your buddy's intestines and land flat on your face? Or (as another poster put it) some other applied force may be sufficient to trigger it - sound waves, a blast of air, a sonic boom from a low-flying jet. If the stuff doesn't de-solidify in a hurry then the enemy could have a field day among the now "statuesque" soldiers...
Yep, and there are plenty of people that need an SUV for work or whatever. Most anti-SUV people I know don't have a problem with people that actually need something like that. The Chevy Suburban has existed since the 30s or something, LONG before the SUV moniker and hatred appeared, and they've sold models every year they made them.
Well because it's shear-thickening liquid, the more violent the impact, the more it locks up and spreads out the impact. One market that they are initially targeting is prison guards because the threat to them is from stabbing rather than gunshot or shrapnel, which the liquid armor stops yet remains flexable unlike plate armor that is rigid. The thing that will always annoy you when wearing armor is weight, heat build up and lack of flexability; this stuff should put a dent in all three.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
If this is really what you bought it for (and actually do), Congratulations. You are one of the 0.5 % of SUV owners who actually should own an SUV. Unfortunately, 99.5 % of them are owened by soccer moms and men who need to overcompensate for something, and are just endangering us all on the roads, and burning very excessive amounts of gasoline.
Here is the problem though, you are the type of person who would have bought an SUV 20+ years ago (yea, they've been making several for at least that long). Most people that buy them now are NOT like you. When one can go to a center city Chicago car dealership and the lot is more than half full of SUVs most of their clientele isn't buying them to go offroading.
Another example, I live in a mostly rural state (Arkansas). I happen to live in an area that is fairly urban but not too far from significant outdoor activities (Fayetteville...around 400,000 people in the metro area) but was born in a town with under 15,000 people that was about an hour and a half away from any sizeable city and was completely surrounded by farmland. One would think that there would be far more SUVs in the small town when I go to visit than in the larger city that I currently live in, but the opposite is true and in a big way. I attribute this to the fact that incomes here are about double what they are in the smaller town and people can afford what they want not just what they need, so people that never do much WALKING off of concrete, much less driving, buy SUVs.
Good point. I'd add that in the example of old rigid car hitting a new car with crumble zones, the crumple zone of the second car will slow down the deceleration of both cars. In effect, the crumple zone of the second car serves both cars equally well (although half as well as if both cars have crumple zones).
(the following is directed toward the GP...)
So, sure drive a big heavy tank, and if you hit a well engineered Toyota you'll do great. Too bad about that Mom and her kids you just plowed through, though. I suppose she should have been driving a big heavy tank, too? Wait a minute, if she's driving a big heavy tank, then there's no advantage to you having one. You might as well both be driving Toyotas and at least save gas.
That's what irks me about this heavy car=safer arguement. It's only safer because you are driving a heavy car and other's aren't. (Yes, there are occasions, such as if you hit something deformable like a small tree, you are safer in a heavy car, but those are rare). If everyone buys into this arguement, pretty soon we are all driving big cars and we are all no safer. We are just burning more gas.
You make the common mistake of considering the sequels to be the same sort of book as the original Dune. The first book is mostly an adventure novel. The later books are much more weighted towards religion, politics, and philosophy. Book 2 and 3 are tough to get through (at least the first time, I found they were easier and more enjoyable upon re-reading). You definitely can't approach them expecting the same hero-villian adventure-battle-conquest scenario.
Frankly, Lord of the Rings is a grade school fairy tale compared to the Dune series. There are very few books that address the scope of history that Dune presents. The first book is a basic adventure but the subsequent books explore the nature of heros, mesiahs, and rulers throughout a vast span of (future) history.
Bullets do not have enough momentum to knock you down, that is a hollywood invention. Think of it this way, if shooting the bullet does not knock the shooter down, it isn't going to knock the person he shot at down either.
Finkployd
You could try explaining it in dollars and cents, so to speak. I'm sure your insurance companies claims department could explain how medical costs and bodily injury/death related lawsuits tend to cost much more than repair and property damage related lawsuits do.
Some people don't speak physics, so you just have to find their "language".
Just a thought.
Your logic is indeed false. First, it is arriving with a velocity and an associated momentum, not a force. Force is imparted on the bullet to change it's momentum and direction. Thus if it's really bouncing in the opposite direction, then twice the energy is required to stop it is imparted to the armor. See the sarcastic reply under yours for why this is unlikely the case. Most fo the time it would likely be deflecting off, requiring less energy than that required to stop the bullet. However, this still tells you nothing of the force. The peak force imparted to the bullet will be determined by the interaction of the bullet with the armor and contact time of the bullet with the armor. However, it's not even the force that you care about, it's the pressure imparted to the tissue. This will be determined by how the force is distributed over the armor. The force will be much greater if it's distributed over a 1 cm^2 area as opposed to a 1 m^2 area. To sum up, it's complicated and you can't draw conclusions of the performance of this armor by whether it "bounces off" or not.
There is a difference between knocking you off balance and throwing you back.
Shotguns will knock you off balance easily if you are not prepared, but no gun on earth is going to lift you off your feet and/or toss you backwards. The ones that are powerfull enough to (military cannons) just rip you to shreads instead.
Finkployd
No, it wouldn't. In simple terms, if all of the energy in the transaction comes from the bullet, then the bullet bouncing off means that *energy is being given back to the bullet*, and unless you're breaking a lot of the laws of physics, that means less energy/momentum is being transferred to the target.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
How do you make nano particles of silica?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
True, but if the flesh under the armor gets hit too hard (penetrated or not) hemorrhaging will result, a situation possibly more dangerous than an open wound. Also consider that if that hit your kneecap, it would likely shatter it... and the bone fragments moving in response to that impact would likely cause bleeding on their own.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
My wife's geo prizm handled one of the largest blizzards i'd seen in ND very nicely.
The whole 'big vehicle' = 'better in snow' thing is something people made up. People who rarely drive in snow and don't know that even with snow on the ground you have fine traction.
Then they hit that one special stop sign that has a sheet of ice covered by a layer of snow, and -bam- they slide into an intersection in their biggun truk. Larger mass doesn't fix inattentiveness.