Mithril

OK, not exactly, but this seems like quite a breakthrough:

Weir and Ryan’s excitement was tempered by the range safety officer who pulled his .44 Magnum and told them bluntly, “This will fail.”

Ryan says, “We loaded it in and it stopped it. And it stopped it a second time, and then a third time.”

They realized they had hit on something special, that could potentially lighten the average 26-pound body armor kit worn by servicemen in the field by as much as two thirds.

“This is something that our competition doesn’t have right now,” Weir explained. “And with this advantage our soldiers, if they wear this body armor, will be able to move faster, run farther, jump higher.”

Body armor for the military and first responders may not be the only thing that can be improved by the new fabric. It could possibly be used to reduce or replace the thick metal plates that protect military aircraft, tanks and other vehicles.

Seems like it might be useful in spacecraft as well. Good for her.

13 thoughts on “Mithril”

  1. “Seems like it might be useful in spacecraft as well.”

    I missed that point! Which is stupid of me since I am very concerned with collisions with space junk.

  2. It may well be useful in spacecraft needing to resist debris hit penetrations while still allowing movement of structures during inflation. A thixotropic mixture, whatever this one turns out to be, may have other uses as well. For instance, in docking spacecraft with a space station, a major fear is a fast dock that hits hard enough, and inaccurately enough, to break through an airlock mechanism inducing cracks extending beyond the airlock into normal pressurized volume of the space station. At the same time, one wants simple mechanisms. So, one way to go is a thixotropic layer around the outside diameter of an airlock that provides slow gentle giving to the slow precise pressure of a proper docking that seals the airlock around the spacecraft’s docking mechanism. At the same time, a fast inaccurate pressure will inhibit sheer flow, allowing the thixotropic layer to transmit force directly to latching mechanisms that signal the other end of the airlock that impact is happening, and to initiate magnetic braking mechanisms in the other end of the airlock that will allow the shock to be absorbed by these magnetic brakes built into the airlock structure, rather than by the space station’s structure.

    So, while the airlock might still be damaged by a “hard enough” smack from a fast/imprecise docking, the main pressure volume of the station would not be breached.

    1. How so? Radiation shielding should be completely oblivious to the mechanical properties of the material.

      1. It could have a high hydrogen content formula…killing two birds as such. Worth looking into I would think?

  3. A coworker’s son is an engineering student at Mississippi State. He has also experimented with non-newtonian armor. He’s tested it against 5.56mm and 7.63x39mm rifle ammo with good results. Finding a non-newtonian liquid that retains it’s properties for months or years is the hard part.

  4. Nice, but not huge news. Projectiles with velocities higher than the speed of sound through the fluid will likely behave very differently; rifle bullets may therefore be another matter altogether, and we can already stop handguns with body armor.

  5. This seems to be your typical breathless piece written by a reporter who doesn’t know the first thing about their subject matter.

    STFs as armor enhancers have been in development for years now. The article fails to state what it is, exactly, if anything, that this student did that was new. It’s possible that this is a new formula that had never been tried before, and shows greater promise than other formulas, but the reporter completely fails to indicate that.

    Another possibility is that this is what used to be a “local interest” type of story–promising student demonstrates scientific and technical skill, is praised, Film At 11:00–and it got blown all out of proportion by an inept (is there any other kind?) reporter.

    I should note that for hard-shell protection, foamed metals are looking very promising; I also wonder if printed metal with cavities (a modern equivalent of a sword fuller?) would qualify. For space applications, I don’t know how well they stack up against radiation.

  6. Wondering about a floating on the surface of the ocean space barge to catch Dragon capsules and protect them from seawater. Guessing the money Newtonian fluid would make things worse, but it might be part of the tool kit.

    Yours,
    Tom

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