Impact Response of Nanofluid-Reinforced Antiballistic Kevlar Fabrics

In the last decades the research on composite materials have been acquiring importance due to the possibility of increasing the material mechanical performances while contemporary decreasing both mass and volume of the structures. Mass lowering is a “must” especially in military and space applications, since aircraft aerodynamic profile needs to be optimized and because of the high costs of launch and launcher and payload mass constraints [1]. The need to face up to the well know problem of the so called “space debris” has led many aero‐ space researchers to look for advanced lightweight materials for ballistic applications. Among all innovative materials, a promising branch of such research focuses on the poly‐ meric composite materials with inclusions of nanostructures [2]. The present work fits in a more general research project, the aim of which is to realize, study and characterize nano‐ composite materials. These latter are currently manufactured in the SASLab of Astronautic Engineering Department of University of Rome “Sapienza” (www.saslab.eu) by mixing the nanoparticles within polymeric matrixes in such a way to obtain a material as homogeneous as possible, in order to have a final composite with improved physical characteristic [3]. The goal of the present study is to perform a ballistic characterization of the nanocomposites by means of an in-house built electromagnetic accelerator. The realization of such experimental apparatus, and mostly the optimization with a view to space debris testing planes, is quite complex since the fundamental machine parameters have high non-linearity theoretical be‐ havior [4]. Hereafter experimental preliminary results of a prototypal device are presented and discussed. An intriguing issue of nanoscience research for aerospace applications is to produce a new thin, flexible, lightweight and inexpensive material that have an equivalent