Soft ballistic panel

Hierarchy modelling for pattern design of a soft ballistic panel... 

Position of darts for the 2D pattern of soft ballistic panel. 

Each layer of the front soft ballistic panel has two darts which follow the points on the circle. The points and all darts move in the same direction at an angle eqnal to 8.92 (17.8° divided by 2) for the first chest dart. In the case of all waist darts this valne is eqnal to 5.43° (10.86° divided by 2). 

Evolution of the darts on different soft ballistic panels. 

A number of fiber/fabric materials including industrial felting,untreated fiber glass cloth and "ballistic nylon" have been used in attempts to produce a soft armor material for interior door panels, headliners, seatbacks, etc. Even nylon, the most successful, isn t worth a damn. None of these attempts at "soft armor" can be expected to stop anything more substantial than slow moving, fairly large pieces of shrapnel. This was made painfully clear to the Viet Nam era soldiers who mistakenly assumed that their ballistic nylon flak jackets were suitable body armor. 

The strategy that we used to adjust the protective zone depends principally on the position of the pattern outside lines of the first layer of the ballistic soft panel. It is necessary to check what kind of protection is provided by the flat pattern defined by the 2D method. The associative link defined by the network of curves and check-points gives the means to adjust the 2D pattern derived from the setting flat of the 3D pattern with the 2D pattern conceived with the pattern flat method. After many adjustments, we obtained two similar patterns (Fig. 8.13). 

Fig. 8.14(a) shows slight differences between the pattern from the 3D method (blue) and the pattern from the 2D method (red). These variations are due to the customization of the 3D pattern, because it rigorously follows the morphology of the real, asymmetrical body. Fig. 8.14(b) shows the results of the front and back 3D pattern first layer of ballistic soft panel. 

Front and back 2D/3D pattern layer 1 of ballistic soft panel. 

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