Advanced Composite Materials Focus Day: Thursday, May 27, 2010

8:30 - 10:30 Improving Mobility To Raise Survivability: Protecting The Warfighter With A Lightweight Armor System

Keeping the warfighter mobile and protected is the ultimate goal for all armor engineers. This case study will discuss mission-critical requirements for lightening the load of each warfighter with a composite sheet layering system, hermetically sealed, unidirectional aramid micro-fibers that are multi-layered in a state-of-the-art cross-ply technology. In this session you will learn about the development of principles applied in developing this material ensure that the underlying fibers are used to their maximum advantage to provide tremendous penetration protection and stopping power while significantly reducing the level of back-face deflection.

How you will benefit:

• Discover in detail the principles behind penetration protection and stopping power
• Learn from technical experts about optimized panel data
• Understand how to customize lightweight, moldable panels in terms of size, weight and installation

What you will learn about:

• Fiber panel and processing
• Moldable armor manufacturing process

Speaker TBA

10:45 - 12:45 Specialized Materials To Drive Armor Innovation: Advanced Materials For Armor Applications

The ever-increasing need for more specialized materials for armor applications continuously pushes the envelope of modern technology, equipment and human intellect. The understanding of fundamental properties of structures increases exponentially through fabrication of very small test objects using new capabilities, and analyzing them with the aid of sophisticated computational models. As this field continues to expand, materials technology will produce products, components and systems that are smaller, smarter, multifunctional, environmentally compatible, more survivable and customizable.

How you will benefit:

• Discover threats and opportunities driving research initiatives
• Gain a better understanding of traditional performance approaches vs. vehicle and Warfighter needs

What you will learn about:

• Ballistic performance
• Fragmentation performance
• Blast mitigation material advances

Dr. Bazle Gama
Scientist
University of Delaware Center for Composite Materials

1:45 - 4:15 Armor Designed To Match The Threats Posed In OIF And OEF: Workshop: Transparent Armor For The Individual Soldier

Transparent armor is an important frontier in the arena of personal protection. With current events in Iraq and Afghanistan, demands for lightweight and better protective transparent armor materials are rapidly increasing. Over the course of several decades, polycarbonate (PC) and polymethylmetacrylate (PMMA) have remained the materials of choice with regards to transparent personnel armor. With good fragment resistance, easy manufacturability and relatively low cost, these materials have proven to stand as the best option. For personnel armor, these materials are used as a monolithic, such as, face shield, goggles and spectacles as well as hybrid of them, such as, for EOD shield and riot protective face shields. However, currently, significant research and development efforts are going into the new improved transparent armor materials. This workshop will discuss new potential materials as well as various approaches and stages of research and development efforts on next generation transparent armor materials.

How you will benefit:

• Gain insight into the vulnerability of face protection with transparent armor compared to the opaque armors
• Obtain the understanding of technical barriers due to the nature of the materials

What you will learn about:

• Learn behavior of transparent materials under ballistic impact
• Learn various approaches of next generation materials researches and some results

Dr. John Song
Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center
US Army Natick

4:15 End Of Advanced Composite Materials Focus Day