Neck-Protecting Soft Body Armor Panels With Folded Bullet Pockets
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current soft body armor panels fail to effectively encapsulate and prevent penetration of large caliber bullets, particularly at oblique angles, leading to potential injury to the wearer's face, neck, and chest, due to stitching failure and bullet petaling or sliding along the layers.
Innovation Solution
The panels are designed with one or more layers folded over at the top edge to form pockets that capture bullets, utilizing various configurations to ensure complete encapsulation, including nested and stacked layers, with the fold direction customizable to enhance protection.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If current multi-layer construction with perimeter stitching is used, then the panel structure is stable, but the panel fails to encapsulate bullets directed at oblique angles, allowing penetration and exit at the top edge
Solution Approach 1:
The panel is divided into multiple functional zones: a strike face layer for direct impact, folded-over layers forming pockets for oblique angle bullets, and a back side layer. This segmentation allows each zone to address specific ballistic threats independently, improving overall encapsulation capability without requiring complete redesign of the entire panel structure.
Solution Approach 2:
The invention introduces a third dimension by folding layers over the top edge to create pockets that extend vertically and horizontally. This dimensional expansion allows the panel to intercept bullets traveling at oblique angles that would otherwise pass through the flat multi-layer construction, transforming a two-dimensional blocking problem into a three-dimensional capture solution.
2Reliability
If more layers are added to increase protection, then bullet encapsulation improves, but the panel weight increases and manufacturing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
Instead of uniformly increasing layer count across the entire panel, the invention concentrates additional protective mass locally at the top edge where oblique angle bullets impact. The folded-over layers create localized pockets only where needed for capturing upward-traveling bullets, while the rest of the panel maintains its original lightweight construction.
Solution Approach 2:
The folded-over layers are nested within the existing panel structure, with each folded layer containing subsequent layers within its pocket formation. This nesting arrangement maximizes the use of available space and material efficiency, achieving enhanced protection without proportionally increasing overall panel weight.
3Reliability
If traditional stitching methods are used to secure layers, then the panel is easy to manufacture, but the stitching fails under ballistic impact, allowing bullet escape
Solution Approach 1:
The folded-over layers are pre-formed into pockets before final assembly, with the stitching pattern specifically designed to secure these pre-formed structures. This preliminary formation ensures that the stitching is positioned optimally to capture bullets before impact occurs, improving durability without requiring complex real-time adjustments during manufacturing.
Solution Approach 2:
The folded-over layers create curved, three-dimensional pocket structures that conform to the trajectory of oblique angle bullets. This curved geometry provides a larger surface area for bullet interaction and better distributes impact forces across the stitching lines, improving stitching durability without requiring overly complex manufacturing procedures.
Data Source
AI summary
A soft body armor panel where one or more layers are folded over as an apron at the top edge forming a pocket(s) centered on the top edge that captures a bullet directed upwardly. The folded layers can take any number of different configurations. The folded layers can be stacked or nested. Normal layers can separate folded layers and/or be within pockets of folded layers. The apron can be 1-20 inches or extend the full height of the layer.