Soft Body Armor for Law Enforcement Applications

Abstract

This paper focuses on the development of a novel ballistic protection composite which can provide both cut resistance and impact protection. The ballistic shield is made by sandwiching high strength, impact resistant, multi-layered woven fabrics between a leather strike face layer and a needlepunched fabric layer that offers protection upto Level IIIA and cut resistance. The needlepunched fabric when punched into the ballistic layer(s) pushes the fibers in the Z direction providing enhanced structural coherence and strength. Three different high performance fibers (Kevlar®, Spectra® and Twaron®) were used to make the composite. Ballistic tests were performed using V50 ballistic requirement based on NIJ standard. The availability of leather layer reduces the velocity of the impact and aides with the blunting of the bullet. A new phenomenon, “mushrooming” of the bullet has been observed. Results on the ballistic protection capabilities of different strike and impact resistant composite chest shields are presented in this paper.