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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.'"
There's a video on break.com where you can see the liquid armor in action - it's pretty amazing:
clicky
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
Ok, forget the bulletproof vests, because I'll never need one. But how much would it cost to coat your car in this stuff? And would it give extra protection?
Philosophy.
First the military is developing something called an "ultrasonic tourniquet", now somebody is making bulletproof peanut butter?? Fuck this shit, the universe is just too weird right now. I am going to bed.
"it's a mix of polyethylene glycol, a polymer found in laxatives..."
As if having a gun fired at you isn't enough to make you shit your pants...
Can they produce gloves able to stand up to shark bites ?
How about gloves for butchers ?
Would they be cheaper to produce than the steel-ring gloves used today ?
Are they water proof ?
How do they react to heat; could they be used in motorcycle clothing ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
But could it stop a lightsaber? Cause you know there's scientists in North Korea working on lightsaber technology. Mr. President, we cannot allow a lightsaber gap!
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
So basicly they're making military use custard (being gentle will let you penetrate it, but use force and you bounce off). Buug how will this stand up against a knife or a bayonet? I know in the modern era this is more or less mute, but it's still something I'd personally wonder about.
I like muppets.
Although I am not sure what the point of it being in this state protects more? Does it weigh less?
:D
Anyway kids if you want to create your own non-newtonian fluid fluid at home heres how.
1. Get your custard power, or corn starch (think baking soda can be used too).
2. Get a dish or a cup. More fun with a large jar though.
3. Add some water to the container and proceed to mix as much powder as possible into the water until it gets to a weird creamy/solid state.
You now have something which is a liquid and solid at the same time. Enjoy!
Product Announcement! New, glistening panty-hose. Shimmering as if they're wet. Catches eyes. Attracts only the daring. Promotes celibacy and abstinence!
... humiliation as you try again and again, unable to even stretch the panty-chasty-hose. The situation goes... limp.
In the heat of the moment, you push her against the wall and kiss. Heat. Fire. Desire. You reach down below her skirt, and trying to be spontanious, rip at her pantyhose... but wait! No satisfying tear or gasp escape from her lips...
"Liqui-hose, helping you dodge a bullet every night."
This stuff sounds like a dilatant.
Kitchen experiment: take some cornflour and some water. Mix one part of water to about two parts of cornflour until you get a thick paste. Play with it.
If you apply gentle pressure, it behaves like a fluid. If you apply strong pressure, it abruptly solidifies. Scoop up a handful and throw it at something, and it'll bounce. Drop something heavy into a bucket of it and it'll sink.
Beach sand also manifests this behaviour, under certain situations; occasionally you can find a patch of heavily waterlogged sand that's rock hard when you walk across it, but if you stand still you slowly find yourself sinking in.
Disclaimer: cornflour almost certainly does not make good body armour.
It's in Dune. Shields result in a form of fighting in which the object is to make way for a slow knife atatck that will go through the shield. Off-topic, it's a pity that Herbert didn't stop at the first book because the rest were so poor by comparison. He used up a lifetime of good ideas in one book and couldn't think of any others. Sad...a friend once suggested that the only titles missing from the series were Dune Buggy and Dune ot forsake me oh my darling.
Pining for the fjords
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".)
The problem is not only the bullet's ability to pierce the armour, but the energy it transfers through the armour. This company : http://www.d3o.com/ use a similar technique but instead of leaving it as liquid, they treat it in a way which turns it into a foam structure. I beat the crap out of a friend's elbows and knees with a shovel while he was wearing d30 stuff, and he didn't feel a thing. It's quite amazing.
...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?
The article states that the material returns to a liquid state rapidly after pressure ceases (which I assume would help further with shock dissipation), but how fast is that? Combat will just require a different approach to breach the defence. Off the top of my head, it woould seem that if your clothing suddenly stiffens, you're vulnerable to attack, especially if you're in the middle of doing something dangerous that requires the use of your limbs.
I just read the novel "Map of Bones" by James Rollins, and his characters makes use of this Liquid Body Armor. He mentioned in the foreward that it was real technology, and that was the first time I heard about it.
It was a thrilling read, too!
Armor-piercing bullets tend to create less damaging wounds than soft bullets that are designed to expand upon impact and dump all of their energy quickly.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Sounds a bit like corn starch. From my PMK days (sigh, Alisha), I remember seeing demos of cornstarch mixed with water. It appears liquidy, but if you smack your hand down in it, it turns to a solid instantly and temporarily, so no splashing occurs. Kinda freaky.
The WikiPedia entry actually has a video of this.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Darn. Now I'll have to respec my Rogue to use maces instead of daggers.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I stand corrected. View the very nice clicky post at the beginning of the comments to understand how it really works.
The question is, can it be used (in sufficiently thick amount?) without hard-to-get materials like kevlar? I am really asking if you can make this at home. From the brief vid, it looked like point 5) above is very possible.
"Sintered Armorgel ; feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books"
Maybe they should ask Neal Stephenson about using that as an ad slogan.
Except 3 rounds from a 45. planted square on his chest will either A: Knock him on his ass. B: Bruise his chest and wind him C: If your lucky pop his sternum D: All of the above Body armor just makes it so the round doesn't kill you. It still hurts like hell. Your body is still absorbing the energy of the round.
You mad
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.
Nice stereotyping.
What if the prime reason for my big SUV with the big tires, and the skookum bush bar on the front is so I can say, go offroad? I grew up in a remote town, but now due to work I have to live in the city. I drive my bush beast on the road not to intimidate as you say, but rather for my own reasons. I like to throw my boat on the roof and go where few can go. My friends and I found a sweet de-activated logging road one day with trees growing in the middle of the road that were 2 meters tall. Sorry, but your honda civic can stay in the city. There was nobody around for prolly 15km. When I got back to work the next week, I was much less stressed out and misserable. Something about tossing a new propane cylinder in a fire puts a nice close to a sweet adventure! I believe in low impact offroading, but when the trees are in the middle of the road... fair game I say.
Now, thos SUV's with the low profile tires and chrome bush bars... I agree with you on that.
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
Wish I could remember the mag I read it in, but there is some company working Motocross gear made from simialr stuff. It created a Roost Guard (chest/shoulder protector) from foam coated with this stuff. The foam was flexible until impact, then the foam became rigid absorbing the impact. The rigidity was based on the speed of compression of the foam. The faster the impact the harder the foam. So for regular riding, it was like wearing a 1/2" layer of flexible foam. If the bike in front spit up a rock, it hit your chest and became hard during the impact then soft again. Or as soon as you went over your bars and landed on your shoulder, the shoulder area became rigid during impact then soft as you lay on the ground wondering what happpend. The last demo was actually going into the bars with your chest and having the whole chest plate harden during impact!
I think the projected public delivery date was around 2008 but for the life of me I cant find the article again. I do remember that it was a British company making the stuff.
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.
Funny that they use an ingredient found in laxatives for all of those "oh crap" moments.
www.wildpad.com
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.
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
That is a very simplified view.
Many guns WILL knock you on your back when you fire them, if you aren't in a proper stance to handle the recoil.
Those same guns, even if the shooter is standing and holding the gun properly, will very well knock someone backwards who wasn't ready to be hit by something like that.
Granted, most of those guns aren't handguns, but that doesn't mean there are no handguns like that(And this is why they're not guns that just anyone can pick up and shoot safely with no training)
Another company, d3o Labs, has developed a similar substance, but they've been adapting it to sports applications -- ski racing suits, hockey pads, and sneakers.
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
Everyone has forgotten their classic SciFi.
Nice pair of Deerskin gloves with a layer of this inside would make brass knuckles so obsolete...
Even big heavy modern cars have crumple zones engineered in. A 6000 lb car with a crumple zone will always be safer than a 6000 lb car without a crumple zone.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I became suspicious when I read the phrase "nano bits of silica". Nano technology my big toe: that's a marketing flourish.
The article mentions that this is a sheer thickening fluid, what they probably mean is shear thickening. That would be a fluid where the coefficient of viscosity increases with increasing strain rates, instead of remaining the classically Newtonian constant. In this case it's probably because the glycol tangles around the silica particles and can't untangle quickly.
While it's quite possible the material can become a semi-solid for the brief duration of a dynamic impact there is no reason to believe, and lots of reasons to not to believe, it becomes a particularly strong solid. In a particulate reinforced composite, which this is in its pseudo-solid state, the matrix (the ethylene glycol) is important to the strength and being a simple organic molecule it's strength must be on the same order of, say, polyethylene.
TFA itself infers this, noting the original idea of using the material itself (in peanut-butter mode) didn't work out. Instead it is employed as the matix in a conventional fiber composite using Kevar or Spectra or something like that as the workhorse.
As in all conventional fiber composites, the fiber bears the load, the matrix supports the fiber. In this case the support, I conjecture, amounts to preventing the fibers from displacing away from the impact point, probably allowing fewer layers of fiber to absorb a given impact energy.
Whle this is innovative and a good idea, it's hardly liquid armour. What I would hope for and maybe expect is better performance against pointy, hard, teflon-coated projectiles of the cop-killer variety which work by nosing the fibers out of the way.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Larry Niven's Known Space series has armor exactly like this, that stiffens on impact. The only thing the armor has in common with Dune is that a slow impact gets through, IIRC in Dune they used some kind of force field. Larry describes what it's like to try to run in a suit like this while being peppered with automatic gunfire. Kinda funny. I don't think the Dune force fields stiffened up and made you fall over while being shot...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Actually, it is not quite that simple. Remember, muzzle energy is mv^2, and while a 45 apc has a higher mass, it has a lower velocity than a 9mm luger. In general, there is not a large difference between the muzzle energy of a 45 apc and 9 mm luger, and some 9mm luger cartridges have a higher muzzle energy than some 45 apc cartridges (they are both available in a bewildering variety of loads).
----- There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend; those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
This stuff sounds like liquid "Stretch Armstrong". The thing was pretty mushy and pliable, but, man if you got hit over the head with one of those...you were 'out' for awhile...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"Armor Piercing" is really a misnomer in a lot of cases. Most of the time, what people (civilians) are referring to are what have in times past been called "cop-killer" bullets (a name that was applied also to Teflon-coated [lubed] bullets) by the sensationalist media and what are more officially known as jacketed hollow-point (JHP) ammunition [a quick note: this is the most common form of self-defense ammunition carried by civilians in the USA and is totally legal to purchase and own]. These are designed to penetrate body armor and clothing better than standard unjacketed hollow-point (HP) rounds while maintaining the hollow-point's rapid expansion characteristics. A standard fully metal jacketed (FMJ) round gets better (tissue) penetration than a JHP, especially if the bullet is of "spitzer" style (pointed) as opposed to wadcutter or semi-wadcutter (flat-tipped) style. Due to complex mechanisms of expansion and point-of-impact material deformation, a lot of the time a JHP in a pistol will get better penetration through armor than an FMJ, but that is a topic for another day.
.223 Remington/5.56x45 NATO (the main cartridge of the M-16 and AK-101/108), 5.7x28mm (FN P90 round), 5.45x39 (AK-74), and 4.67HK (HK MP7). Additionally, some larger calibers simply have enough velocity and ballistic coefficient to pierce virtually all armor at very long ranges: 6.5mm Grendel (a few AR-15s), .30-06 (M1 Garand), and .50 BMG (M85 Barrett, M60) are a few such cartridges.
.45ACP round will result in a primary wound channel of .45". Shooting them with a JHP .45ACP will result in a wound channel (with a good bullet, like Speer Gold-Dot) of .7-.8". Bigger hole==bigger wound.
In the military sense, an "armor-piercing" projectile is a steel-(or tungsten-, or depleted uranium-)cored, brass- or copper-jacketed projectile that, upon impact will strike like a normal bullet or whatever caliber and then allow the penetrator to slip free of the bullet body and, by virtue of a very small cross-sectional area, penetrate deeply into the armor of the target.
Other bullets which are sometimes called "armor piercing" are standard rifle rounds (FMJ, BT, BTHP, OTM) in small-diameter calibers that easily puncture through most modern body armors. These are calibers such as
Oh, and the primary wounding mechanism for expanding rounds is not rapid energy dump but large wound channels provided by an expansion to up to twice the bullet's initial diameter. Shooting someone with an FMJ
"Arg! My squeedleespooch!" -Zim, Invader Zim
Bill Hicks predicted the future:
*pshwhshswsh*
"What's that?"
"Musket repellant."
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Point #1: Momentum is a vector quantity. This means that a bullet approaching a person from the left and a bullet leaving said person, heading right, have totally different momentum vectors.
Point #2: In situations where outside forces can be ignored (such as a bullet impact), momentum is said to be "conserved". This means that any momentum change the bullet experiences has to be equal and opposite to the momentum change the person experiences. A bullet of mass "m" which is travelling to the right at speed "v" has momentum "mv" (taking the direction "right" to be positive). Similarly, the same bullet travelling to the left at speed "v" has momentum "-mv". Therefore, a bullet which ricochets off at its initial speed has TWICE the momentum change compared to a bullet which simply stops. As a result, the person has to experience double the momentum change as well.
This means that a ricochet imparts MORE momentum to the target than an embedded bullet would, which is (as another poster remarked) why solar sails are reflective.
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.
How well would this work as armor for motorcyclists? I spend a lot of time trying to find gear that's comfortable enough to wear as normal clothing. Both so that I'm comfortable on the bike, and so I don't have to spend so much time gearing up and down for each trip, even it it's only to the convenience store.
plus-good, double-plus-good