Composite metal foams (CMFs) are tough enough to turn an armor-piercing bullet into dust on impact. Given that these foams are also lighter than metal plating, the material has obvious implications for creating new types of body and vehicle armor – and that’s just the beginning of its potential uses.
Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State, has spent years developing CMFs and investigating their unusual properties. The video seen here shows a composite armor made out of her composite metal foams. The bullet in the video is a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor piercing projectile, which was fired according to the standard testing procedures established by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). And the results were dramatic.
“We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters,” Rabiei says. “To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor.” The results of that study were published in 2015.
But there are many applications that require a material to be more than just incredibly light and strong. For example, applications from space exploration to shipping nuclear waste require a material to be not only light and strong, but also capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and blocking radiation.
Last year, with support from the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Rabiei showed that CMFs are very effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation. And earlier this year, Rabiei published work demonstrating that these metal foams handle fire and heat twice as well as the plain metals they are made of.
Now that these CMFs are becoming well understood, there could be a wide array of technologies that make use of this light, tough material. Armor, if you’ll forgive the pun, barely scratches the surface.
More information: Matias Garcia-Avila et al. Ballistic performance of composite metal foams, Composite Structures (2015). DOI: 10.1016/j.compstruct.2015.01.031
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-metal-foam-obliterates-bullets.html#jCp
I was afraid something like this was coming eventually. Our weapons are being made obsolete, and the final nail is being put in the coffin of our rights.
I did some further research, and the news isn’t quite as bad as I’d thought — yet. This “metal foam” armor has been studied for a few years now, and it doesn’t appear to be the game-changer a lot of the media hype is suggesting.
First, this armor plating isn’t made solely of the metal foam mentioned. It uses a layer of boron carbide on top of the metal foam layer. Boron carbide is the same ceramic currently used in military plates. The total thickness of the final ceramic-metal composite is close to an inch. Current armor plates are somewhat thinner and less bulky.
Another important factor is the weight. When I first read this, I was afraid they had drastically cut the weight of armor that can stop .30-06 AP. But other articles on this story mention experts saying that this new armor is estimated to be “UP TO” 20% lighter than the current armor. That’s fairly significant, but not exactly earth-shattering.
So, we’re okay for now. But the march toward the obsolescence of our current weapons and ammo continues. All the conservatard gun owners who cheer every time a new weapon, armor, or other infantry gadget is developed (“Yay, this will make our troops safer!”) are too f’n stupid to realize that those things will eventually be used to take their guns, or at least nullify the Second Amendment.
The body armor may prevent penetration but what happens to the heart and rib cage from a 2000 pound instantaneous blow to the chest?
correct. The only way to make it work against the FPS that the bullet is traveling would be to make it reactive armor that pushes the impact outwards. That will require larger and heavier armor that can actually injure the wearer of the armor. The FPS impact is still going to knock you down.
I don’t see this as an issue presently, but the fact that they are working on this should make us keep our eyes open even more for new concepts that make our weapons less lethal.
No matter what they come up with, it can and will be defeated. Look what a bunch of goat herders in Iraq did to some of our tanks by trial and error. We built a machine that we almost cant destroy ourselves, yet they figured out how.
Lots of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken hits to their current-issue ceramic armor plates from rounds like 7.62×39 and 7.62x54R and gotten off with nothing more than a bad bruise, or maybe a broken rib or two. Sometimes it hurts badly enough to put the soldier out of the fight for a while, but that’s nothing that can be counted on.
This ceramic-on-metal-foam armor appears to alleviate blunt trauma even more. The metal foam seems to function like the crumple zone in a car. The article mentions a mere 8 mm of backface deformation, which isn’t likely to do much harm to the wearer.
If I had to fight “Iron Man” and could only depend on blunt trauma to incapacitate him, I’d want a massive bullet (like a .416 Rigby with dangerous game rounds, or a 600-grain Brenneke 12-gauge slug) AND I’d want to make a headshot. Blunt trauma to the head is going to be WAY more effective than blunt trauma to the body.
They already have body armor, and you already know how to shoot around it, but BMF (above) is right.
Wait too long and the human race is screwed forever. If your bullets don’t become obsolete, you may be firing them into robots that roll endlessly off an assembly line.
Jolly, that is when you go after the assembly line and the owner of the assembly line.
Robots can be stopped……with paintball guns. Hit them with paintball in the areas that they use to see…..nothing sadder than a blind robot.
I wonder how this stuff works in a fire. I bet there is a weakness of this stuff that can be a fatal flaw.
You have to get very close for paint balls to be effective.
let us look at this in a psycological way
our opressors will begin to feel invincible thereby
becoming lax,arrogant,and careless it will be these things
that will be thier down fall.take a lesson from the french
in indochina. remember dien bien phu, hmm thier arrogance
mostly and feeling of european superiorority that was there downfall.
keep your MOA at one eye at a time?