From Filaments to Fabric Packs - Simulating the Performance of Textile Protection Systems

Abstract : Enhancements in lightweight and compliant textile based protection systems require the use of advanced materials as well as innovative reinforcement and hybridization schemes. To date, the majority of the ballistic textile development has relied on experiments and experience. While both analytical and computational methods for this class of materials, specifically fabrics and compliant composite laminates, has yielded insight, advanced material models and modeling capabilities with the resolution to accurately describe the interactions between the fibers, yarns and impacting projectile have only recently become available. Scientists at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office are collaborating with researchers in academia to develop and utilize advanced modeling capabilities for fabrics and armor grade composites used in body armor designs. The technology being developed will ultimately relate the constituent material the filament to its incorporation into a textile architecture through its manufacturing processes to a ballistic performance prediction of the corresponding textile and will allow a true materials-by-design approach to textile based protection systems. The current paper describes efforts associated with utilizing numerical analysis towards gaining a fundamental understanding of the projectile-textile interaction, the development of numerical techniques relating textile manufacture to ballistic prediction and hybridized systems currently being developed that can benefit from this detailed analysis.