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Underground > Laboratory >

US army developing liquid body armour

Irony of Ironies

08:38 / 25.04.04

From the ever useful Military.com, the US military is developing body armour made with polyethelene glycol and nanoparticles of silica. Next stop: Miss Dwyer's 4-D armour?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:56 / 25.04.04

I can foresee all manner of barrack-room japes- punch the guy hard enough, his elbow will FREEZE!!!

It'd be interesting to find out what force of impact is needed to make the stuff change state- and can it change back? If you've fallen and the fabric's rigid, does it stay that way and therefore inflexible?

Anyway you look at it, this is pretty mad. In the impressively scary, yet scarily impressive sense of the word.

07:52 / 26.04.04

I'm amazed at how simple this is.

Basically imagine a sack filled with a gel-like liquid and in that liquid you have rocks floating around. Now if you punch the sack the area which you punch compresses thereby pushing the floating rocks closer together to each other and absorbing your punch.

Now instead of your fist imagine a bullet. It punches the vest causing the silica (the "rocks" in the analogy) to concentrate in the area of impact. This stops the bullet from fully penetrating the armour. And since the silica is floating in a gel the gel doesn't flow out of the holes caused by the bullet's penetration of the outer core of the vest.

16:41 / 26.04.04

I wonder if it's any good against rocks.

18:05 / 26.04.04

I seem to remember from my brief contact with a game called Necromunda (which is sort of sci-fi) an armour based on exactly this principle.

flufeemunk effluvia

22:06 / 27.04.04

That whole liquid-to-solid business makes me think about the suits in that zero-g laser tag game from Ender's Game. Cool.