Future opportunities to improve personal armour design

4 Future opportunities to improve personal armour design 

There will always be hazardous tasks to do. While people are put in harm s way, it is the personal armour designer s responsibihty not only to produce life-saving equipment but also to demonstrate the quahty of their decision-making. This latter 

The opportunities to design better armour come through technological developments in the constituents of armour novel materials and improved constmction. Developments in materials (e.g. from metals to polymers and then to ceramics) can result in step changes in performance. These are then followed by years of constmction tweaks while the threat envirorunent evolves to overmatch the protection. Further changes occur when the prices and availabihty of armour-grade materials fall due to processing improvements. 

The options for designing armour better are to improve the models used as the basis of design, allow for a greater range of scenarios and make the output of simulation more accessible to the decision-maker. 

Personal armour saves Uves however, this benefit comes at the perralty of making tasks more difficrrlt and experrsive to do. There is a trade-off to be made between protection and the brrrden to be tolerated. In order to do this, armour designers must imderstand the threat, armorrr, hrrman vulnerability artd the rrature of protectiort. 

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