Periodic Cellular Armor for Blast and Ballistic Protection
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Current armor solutions for vehicles and personnel face challenges in effectively mitigating high-amplitude blast waves and high-velocity projectiles, particularly due to limitations in strength, crush resistance, and susceptibility to corrosion and delamination, while also requiring lightweight and cost-effective modifications to address evolving threat environments.
Innovation Solution
The development of Periodic Cellular Materials (PCM) structures, including honeycombs, corrugated structures, and lattice materials, which provide enhanced impact energy absorption and resistance to both blast and ballistic threats through their efficient load support capabilities, stiffness, and ability to be configured for specific threat levels, utilizing materials like titanium, iron, nickel, and aluminum alloys, and ceramics.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of energy
If commercial stochastic foams are used for shock mitigation, then blast pressure absorption is improved, but strength and crush resistance deteriorate due to low strength modes of failure
Solution Approach 1:
The patent employs periodic cellular materials with controlled porosity that maintain open-cell structures resistant to elastic buckling. These materials absorb blast pressure through their porous architecture while maintaining sufficient strength to resist crushing, unlike conventional stochastic foams that fail by strut bending.
Solution Approach 2:
The invention uses composite sandwich panel constructions combining periodic cellular core materials with face sheets. This composite structure provides both the energy absorption capabilities needed for blast mitigation and the structural strength required to resist crushing and penetration from projectiles.
2Stress or pressure
If honeycomb structures are used for shock mitigation, then structural stiffness is improved, but force transmission increases due to higher stress needed to initiate core crushing
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies periodic cellular structures with locally optimized cell geometries and material properties. The core materials are designed with specific relative densities and cell structures that provide appropriate stiffness at the local level while controlling force transmission characteristics to reduce peak loads during impact events.
3Stability of the object's composition
If closed cell topology is used in honeycomb structures, then structural integrity is improved, but susceptibility to corrosion and delamination increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent utilizes open-cell periodic cellular materials rather than closed-cell honeycombs. The open-cell topology allows for better drainage and reduced moisture entrapment, thereby improving corrosion resistance while maintaining structural integrity through the periodic cellular architecture that resists elastic buckling.
4Weight of moving object
If low core weight configurations are used in sandwich panels, then weight reduction is achieved, but load support efficiency deteriorates due to elastic buckling failure
Solution Approach 1:
The patent employs periodic cellular materials with optimized relative density parameters and cell geometry configurations. These parameter optimizations allow the lightweight core to achieve maximum load support efficiency by preventing elastic buckling through the periodic cellular structure, maintaining strength-to-weight ratios superior to conventional foams and honeycombs.
Applied Scientific Principles
This section explains which scientific principles are used to turn an abstract innovation direction into a practical engineering solution.
Function Achieved in This Case
These PCM structures offer superior ballistic and blast protection with reduced weight and cost, maintaining structural integrity under dynamic loads and allowing for adaptable protection levels, effectively mitigating both blast pressure and projectile penetration.
Implementation Method 1
Periodic Cellular Materials (PCM) structures, including honeycombs, corrugated structures, and lattice materials, which provide enhanced impact energy absorption
Implementation Method 2
Modern weapons and their improvised variants utilize high-amplitude, overpressure waves and high-explosive projectiles to cause damage to vehicles and people
Data Source
AI summary
Structures based upon periodic cellular materials that provide a potential for defeating combinations of both air blast loading and ballistic attack either sequentially or simultaneously, or combination of both. The cellular structures may also be configured to meet the stiffness and strength support requirements of particular vehicle or other applications, systems or structures. The armor is therefore potentially able to support normal service loads and defeat blast and ballistic threats when necessary. The structure provides for using efficient load support capabilities of the material (without a high armor protection level) in low threat conditions, as well as the ability to modify the system to increase its level protection to a desired or required level. This would reduce the weight of the protection system in normal (low threat) conditions which reduces vehicle wear and tear, as well as cost savings in fabrication of applicable structures or systems.