Liquid Armor

[Jay-qu]

The current war in Iraq is leaving behind a legacy of wounded soldiers. For every fatality there have been between seven or eight injured -- a number amounting to 18,356 as of June 11, 2006 (U.S. Department of Defense). That's a higher ratio of injured to dead than in any previous American war, a mixed blessing that can largely be attributed to advances in body armor and improved battlefield medical treatment.

 

A new "liquid armor" could be the solution for protecting the parts of the body that aren't currently covered by standard-issue ballistic vests – arms and legs, where many of these devastating and life-threatening injuries occur. Co-developed by two research teams – one led by Norman Wagner at the University of Delaware, and the other led by Eric Wetzel at the U.S. Army Research Lab in Aberdeen, MD – the liquid technology will soon lead to light, flexible full-body armor.

 

The liquid - called shear thickening fluid is actually a mixture of hard nanoparticles and nonevaporating liquid. It flows normally under low-energy conditions, but when agitated or hit with an impact it stiffens and behaves like a solid. This temporary stiffening occurs less than a millisecond after impact, and is caused by the nanoparticles forming tiny clusters inside the fluid. "The particles jam up forming a log jam structure that prevents things from penetrating through them," Wagner explains.

 

Wagner and Wetzel developed a way to specially treat ballistic fabrics, such as Kevlar, with the liquid, making them dramatically more resistant to puncture and much better at reducing blunt trauma.

 

http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_id=218392807

[ronthepon]

Wow!

 

Reality is more imaginative than fiction!

[IDMclean]

Reality is always far more strange than fiction.

"Mr. Pauli, we in the back are all convinced that your theory is crazy. But what divides us is whether your theory is crazy enough!"

[Janus]

Wow!

 

Reality is more imaginative than fiction!

 

But maybe not in this case. In Ringworld and some of his other "Known Space" stories Larry Niven wrote about an "impact suit" made of a material that was normally light and flexible but became rigid under a hard blow.

[Mercedes Benzene]

This sounds like very good technology. I would like to see it perfected and actually on the market soon!

[Vagabond -SC2-]

that is cool and its partly coming out of UofD... who knew.. first DuPont and now...

 

Is there not a putty (i remember playing with it as a kid) that if you keep moving it, it stays together but if you let it sit it will ooze though your fingers.

[Roadam]

Newer and newer weapons and armors for total dominance.:eek:

What is the fuss if one allied falls, when on the other side at least 50 are dead and even more injured.

 

I would rather apply this technotogy to better uses(space, demining,...).

[InfiniteNow]

JQ - You're worse than Tormod. Teasing us like that. I thought this was going to be a thread about Scotch.

 

 

Hmmm... I do that a lot. What was that thing about inkblots? :eek:

 

Cool article. Thanks. :eshout:

[CraigD]

Is there not a putty (i remember playing with it as a kid) that if you keep moving it, it stays together but if you let it sit it will ooze though your fingers.

Silly putty.

 

It’s in a big family of materials known as non-Newtonian liquids, which includes such simple liquids as corn starch dissolved in water.

 

The phenomena and basic physics of these sorts of materials have been known since about 1835 – only about 150 years less than the basic physics of fluids, or much of anything, have been. I can’t find a history of non-Newtonian liquids, but have read references to toys in the early 20th century, decades before the famous “Nutty Putty” that was eventually renamed “Silly Putty”, and a few other trademark names.

 

I’m not sure if the “impact suit” from Niven’s 1970 novel “Ringworld” that Janus mentions was the first fictional description of non-Newtonian liquid body armor. I first encountered the fictional stuff in an ”Aftermath” FRPG campaign around 1984, which described it as having been derived from motorcycle racing clothing. Amazingly, when I mentioned this to the only Grand Prix motorcycle racer I’ve ever known, he had a 2-piece suit of the stuff. I can’t recall the manufacturer, or find it via a web search. My bike-racing buddy got it after he was injured in a bad fall, but gave up on it when he discovered that it was, unfortunately, so thermally insulating that he couldn’t keep the sweat out of his eyes or from puddling in his gloves. The suit was squishy – you could actually compress parts of it, and feel a liquid move from one cell to another – though it was somehow made so that all the liquid didn’t get squished out of knees, elbows, or other high-contact-pressure places.

 

Like the UoD and Aberdeen armors, the fictional armor in Aftermath was bullet proof. I don’t know if the bike crash suit was, since, even though basically unsellable, it was too expensive to risk the possibility of ruining it with a test shot.

 

None of these old ideas for non-Newtonian liquid armor of which I’m aware use it to wet a high strength fabric like Kevlar, silk, boron, etc., though, so the new armor appears to be a new idea.

[Lancaster]

Way cool. Foor most of it's history, body armor is always one step behind the weapons it defends against. Maybe this turn the tables on those darn terrorists.

[Pangolin]

Science fiction has been on to this for over 10 years at least. The armor uses a well known property of certain starch solutions. The problem has always been finding the right combination of micro-plates and suspension fluid.