Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Scale armor is not exactly a new invention – it dates back at least to ancient Rome and China – but an MIT-led team of researchers is putting a modern-day spin on the concept by crafting body armor that is tough enough to stop a bullet, flexible and inspired by fish scales.
The innovation, reported on Monday by Popular Science and detailed in a paper published earlier this year in the journal Soft Matter, is based on the concept that the fish are flexible enough to be good swimmers, but also have durable scales that can protect them from harm. By adapting those traits into new body armor, the researchers sought to well-balanced protective gear.
Measuring armor’s effectiveness through protecto-flexibility
Building upon ancient types of scale armor, Stephan Rudykh, an assistant professor at MIT and the head of the Technion’s Mechanics of Soft Materials Laboratory, and his colleagues came up with a single metric to measure the armor’s value: protecto-flexibility, Pop Sci explained.
“Many species of fish are flexible, but they are also protected by hard scales. Taking inspiration from nature, we tried to replicate this protecto-flexibility by combining two layers of materials – one soft for flexibility and the other with armor-like scales,” Rudykh said in a statement.
Typically, strength and flexibility are viewed as competing properties, the professor explained. However, he and his colleagues came up with a way to increase penetration resistance of armor by a factor of 40 while only reducing flexibility by a factor of five. They used a combination of hard scales on the exterior that covered soft, flexible tissue beneath.
Adjustable protection for both astronauts and the military
Furthermore, the armor itself is adaptable. When it is used by soldiers, the material’s flexibility can be increased in the joints while the anti-penetration properties in the upper body can also be enhanced. For astronauts, the suit can be made to protect them from radiation or tiny meteorites while they are on spacewalks.
“That attribute allows for the fabric to be tailored to the wearer’s body and the environment that the wearer will be facing,” Rudykh explained. “This work is part of a revolution in materials properties. Once we can gain control over a material’s micro properties, using 3-D printing we can create materials of an entirely different type, each with the ability to be adjusted to fit the wearer, the need, and the environment.”
While the armor is still in the early testing stages, the researchers report that their findings may “provide new guidelines for developing simple material architectures that retain flexibility while offering protection with highly tunable properties” and that “careful selection of microstructural characteristics can provide designs optimized for protection against penetration while preserving flexibility.”
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