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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
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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...
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.
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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.
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."
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?
I saw a thing on Brainiac where they filled a swimming pool full of cornflour and water and got a guy to walk on it... it was ok so long as he kept moving but as soon as he stopped he sank pretty quickly.
Getting out was pretty hard as the more he pulled the more it turned like concrete... pretty scary if you start sinking in this stuff and have nothing to hang on to!
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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
This is a common fallacy when people have just a rudimentary understanding of physics and no other applicable knowledge. A car that crumples well is only definitely better when it's car vs much more massive stationary solid object (e.g., a rock face). When it's two cars, however, it's more like the game theory example of the prisoner's dilemma. If both cars crumple well, then it's fairly good for both. If, however, one vehicle is both more rigid and more massive—something common to older cars—then the situation is greatly weighted in that vehicle's favor. An extreme example of this would be an M1 Abrams vs a small Toyota.
Thus, if you don't give a shit about the other guys as long as your kids are safe, and you're not a drunk/wreckless driver that is likely to slam into a building/rock face/telephone pole/whatever, the safest option may well be the biggest, heaviest vehicle with a strong frame that you can possibly find.
if ... you're not a drunk/wreckless driver that is likely to slam into a building/rock face/telephone pole/whatever
I would think it very unlikely that a driver reckless enough to be likely to slam into buildings or rock faces would remain wreckless for long.
Darn. Now I'll have to respec my Rogue to use maces instead of daggers.
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Your example relies on a signficant difference in mass as well as overall rigidity of the two vehicles in question. Deformable frames being about absorbing energy (and momentum, being an inelastic collision) in an impact. An M1 brings way more Kinetic Energy to the impact than can be absorbed by a deforming frame of a Toyota.
The safety of the passengers is dependent on how quickly the vehicle passenger compartment decelerates, as that will determine with what force they impact the interior of the vehicle (the so-called "second impact"). The M1 will not decelerate very much, but it is because of the mass disparity, not that it is rigid.
Obviously a crumple zone cannot absorb an unlimited amount of energy, but up to the amount it can absorb it is definitely good for you, whether you are hitting something rigid or not.
"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.
Actually, this is not true. I've got some friends who do car safety analysis all the time and they say that a modern crumple zone + rigid passenger egg is safer than a rigid car or light truck in a collision - the crumple zone absorbs most of its car's energy and the rigid car flips over.
There are many dead SUV drivers to disprove your claim.
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
The real selling point of this stuff in car finishes wouldn't be that your car is now bullet proof (although that would make a good bullet point in the brochure.)
Consider this:
We drove this new Ford(TM) Mustang(TM) with DuPont(TM) Protectoguard(TM) coating on the Jersy turnpike, for 200 miles, in construction, behind a Peterbuilt(TM) dumptruck. We recorded 390 discrete stone strikes. But thanks to the Miricles of Science (TM) there isn't a single paint chip in the finish. Blah Blah Blah. Now that's a BOLD move.(TM)
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.
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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.
Did these "friends" of yours also happen to have a car full of explosives and yelling "God is Great" when they hit the tank.
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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.
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