October 2, 2018 | International, Land
Army Looks to Nature to Improve Body Armor
By ARL Public Affairs Future soldiers will be better protected in combat by stronger and lighter body armor thanks to innovative work at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Materials science engineers are using nature as the inspiration for breakthroughs in additive manufacturing. “My project is to design a system that can 3-D print armor ceramics that will allow production of parts with graded structures similar to an abalone structure in nature that will improve the ceramic armor's toughness and survivability with lower weight,” said Joshua Pelz, a materials science and engineering doctoral candidate at the University of California San Diego. He spent this summer working with Army scientists at ARL's Rodman Materials Science Laboratory at APG to design and build a unique 3-D printer. Two syringes containing distinct, viscous ceramic slurries are connected to a custom-made auger and print head. Pelz took advantage of his computer programming skills to hack into the 3-D printer, tricking it into using its own fan controls to manipulate the ratio of materials being printed. He designed a custom auger and print head and even used the same 3-D printer to create those parts. “Josh found a way to implement our ideas into that machine, take apart machine, take out the polymer FDM heads that are built into it, start to look at how to design the machine to incorporate our ceramic slurries and print those slurries into the head but then he had to do a lot of really basic work looking at how to actually hack the machine,” said Dr. Lionel Vargas-Gonzalez, Ceramics Synthesis and Processing team lead at the laboratory. “We've got people like Josh who were very gifted and talented and can bring all that kind of capability and use a lot to our advantage it's a huge benefit for us.” Current processing techniques used to create ceramic armor are limited by how engineers can combine materials into a stronger composite material. “For ceramics, that's a bit of a challenge because with you can't really do what a one-step additive manufacturing process like you could if a metal or a polymer,” Vargas-Gonzalez said. “We see this as a next avenue for armor because we're going to be able to, in theory, design armor in a way that we can attach multiple materials together into a single armor plate, and be able to provide ways for the armor to perform better than it can be just based on one material alone.” Full article: http://science.dodlive.mil/2018/10/01/army-looks-to-nature-to-improve-body-armor/