It's not quite the stuff of John Wick's suit, but this novel fiber is stronger than its predecessor.
Body armor has a clear purpose: to prevent a bullet, or perhaps a shard from an explosion, from puncturing the fragile human tissue behind it. But donning it doesn’t come lightly, and its weight is measured in pounds. For example, the traditional Kevlar fabric that would go into soft body armor weighs about 1 pound per square foot, and you need more than one square foot to do the job.
But a new kind of Kevlar is coming out, and it aims to be just as resistant to projectiles as the original material, while also being thinner and lighter. It will not be tailored into a John Wick-style suit, which is the stuff of Hollywood, but DuPont, the company that makes it, says that it’s about 30 percent lighter. If the regular Kevlar has that approximate weight of 1 pound per square foot, the new stuff weighs in at about .65 or .7 pounds per square foot.
A bullet-resistant layer needs to do two tasks: ensure that the bullet cannot penetrate it, and also absorb its energy—and translate that energy into the bullet itself, which ideally deforms when it hits. A layer of fabric that could catch a bullet but then acted like a loose net after it was hit by a baseball would be bad, explains Joseph Hovanec, a global technology manager at the company. “You don’t want that net to fully extend either, because now that bullet is extending into your body.
The key is how strong the fibers are, plus the fact that “they do not elongate very far,” says Hovanec. “It’s the resistance of those fibers that will then cause the bullet—because it has such large momentum, [or] kinetic energy—to deform. So you’re actually catching it, and the energy is going into deforming the bullet versus breaking the fiber.” The bullet, he says, should “mushroom.” Here’s a
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