Personal armour design

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... 

Notice that a feedback loop exists between stages 1 and 2. Tasks should be designed to be as safe as practically possible before designing armour. Personal armour should be thought of as the last line of defenee. 

Couldrick (2004) demonstrates how to modify CASPER to calcirlate the two most important negative attributes of personal armour - total weight and materials cost. This means that one model can estimate the protection (UF), weight (W) and cost ( ) of each armour solution. It allows the designer to explore, for example, the optimal balance between the strength of armour and its area of coverage. The result is that hundreds of thousands of different armour solutions can be simulated and down-selected automatically to a small subset which can be manufactured for wearer trials. 

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. 

Couldrick, C. A. (2004) A Systems Approach to the Design of Personal Armour for Explosive Ordnance Disposal , http //hdl.handle.net/1826/828. EngD thesis, Cranfield... 

Davis, E. G. and Neades, D. N. (2002) Novel Application of Trauma Severity Scoring in the Design, Development, and Evaluation of US Body Armour against Ballistic Threats , Proceedings of Personal Armour Systems Symposium 2002 (PASS2002), Atlantic Hotel, The Hague, The Netherlands, 18-22 November 2002, pp. 33-41. 

In modem warfare, the importance of individual soldiers as sources of information will increase. New systems and equipment will be designed to enhance a soldier s role as a link in a local surveillance network. There will be increased importance placed on communication between soldiers and other units on the battlefield such as armoured vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles (Figure 11.4). To cater to all these needs, the personal equipment of a soldier could include head-mounted displays, GPS, digital radio and video cameras. When designing these systems, textile anteimae will play a role in optimising the system performance. 

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