Assessment of small arms (ball round) body armor performance

摘要

In this work, the performance of ceramic/composite small arms (ball round) bullet protective armor systems is investigated with the objective of decreasing system weight without substantially impacting cost, bulk, multiple-hit performance, or durability. The approach chosen was to investigate novel armor systems and rank them according to weight reduction at equivalent cost relative to several baseline systems. The general trend in the data indicates that thin ceramics backed by high-performance composites provide the best value and the best performance of the armor systems investigated. In addition to a synopsis of the performance results of this work, several key aspects of phenomenology are presented.