Ballistic Vests

Technology Roadmap Sections and Deliverables

The selected technology that Team 6 will be spending the remainder of the semester on developing a technology road map is ballistic vest technology (specifically for military and law enforcement applications).

Clear and unique identifier:

• 2BV - Ballistic Vests

This indicates that we are dealing with a “level 2” roadmap at the product level.

Roadmap Overview

The working principle and architecture of Ballistic Vests is depicted in the below.

A ballistic vest works by absorbing the kinetic energy from a high-speed projectile (bullet or shrapnel from an explosion) at the point of impact over a wide area. The ballistic vest is meant to spread the kinetic energy by displacing it across the ballistic vest materials in a process called material deformation. The deformation occurs in two-fold, deformation of the ballistic vest materials as the bullet absorbs the kinetic energy and deformation of the bullet itself, called mushrooming. The remainder of the energy is consumed as heat.

This technology is a lifesaving technology to aid military personnel and law enforcement during their daily activities. A ballistic vest is typically worn on an individual’s chest and is meant to be replaced after it has taken an impact (from high speed projectile or mishandling of vest e.g. dropped) or date of manufacturing has expired. There are six levels of protection (Type I, Type IIA, Type II, Type IIA, Type III, and Type IV). The history of personal armor dates back to 500 BC when chain mail/coat mail was used as a form of individual protection from slashing blows by an edged weapon (e.g. swords). Modern day individual body armor is meant to protect from high speed projectiles. New fibers were discovered in the 1960’s for the possibility to make resistant vests and DuPont developed Kevlar ballistic fabric in the 1970s.

Design Structure Matrix (DSM) Allocation

The 2-BV tree that we can extract from the DSM above shows us that the Ballistic Vest (2BV) is part of a larger initiative on personnel protection (1PP), and that it requires the following key enabling technologies at the subsystem level: 3SA Soft Armor, 3HA Hard Armor.

Roadmap Model using OPM

We provide an Object-Process-Diagram (OPD) of the 2BV roadmap in the figure below. This diagram captures the main object of the roadmap (Ballistic Vest), its various instances including common ballistic vest products, its decomposition into components (front carrier/panel, rear carrier/panel, side carrier/panel, soft armor (front & rear), hard plate (front, back, & sides, etc.), its characterization by Figures of Merit (FOMs) as well as the main processes (Protecting with two states protected and unprotected).

An Object-Process-Language (OPL) description of the roadmap scope is auto-generated and given below. It reflects the same content as the previous figure, but in a formal natural language.

Figures of Merit

The table below show a list of FOMs by which ballistic vest can be assessed.

Alignment with Company Strategic Drivers

The table below shows an example of potential strategic drivers and alignment of the 2SEA technology roadmap with it.

The list of drivers shows that the company views HAPS as a potential new business and wants to develop it as a commercially viable (for profit) business (1). In order to do so, the technology roadmap performs some analysis - using the governing equations in the previous section - and formulates a set of FOM targets that state that such a UAV needs to achieve an endurance of 500 days (as opposed to the world record 26 days that was demonstrated in 2018) and should be able to carry a payload of 10 kg. The roadmap confirms that it is aligned with this driver. This means that the analysis, technology targets, and R&D projects contained in the roadmap (and hopefully funded by the R&D budget) support the strategic ambition stated by driver 1. The second driver, however, which is to use the HAPS program as a platform for developing an autonomy stack for both UAVs and satellites, is not currently aligned with the roadmap.

Positioning of Company vs. Competition

The figure below shows a summary of other electric and solar-electric aircraft from public data.

The aerobatic aircraft Extra 330LE by Siemens currently has the world record for the most powerful flight certified electric motor (260kW). The Pipistrel Alpha Electro is a small electric training aircraft which is not solar powered, but is in serial production. The Zephyr 7 is the previous version of Zephyr which established the prior endurance world record for solar-electric aircraft (14 days) in 2010. The Solar Impulse 2 was a single-piloted solar-powered aircraft that circumnavigated the globe in 2015-2016 in 17 stages, the longest being the one from Japan to Hawaii (118 hours).

SolarEagle and Solara 50 were both very ambitious projects that aimed to launch solar-electric aircraft with very aggressive targets (endurace up to 5 years) and payloads up to 450 kg. Both of these projects were canceled prematurely. Why is that?

The Pareto Front (see Chapter 5, Figure 5-20 for a definition) shown in black in the lower left corner of the graph shows the best tradeoff between endurance and payload for actually achieved electric flights by 2017. The Airbus Zephyr, Solar Impulse 2 and Pipistrel Alpha Electro all have flight records that anchor their position on this FOM chart. It is interesting to note that Solar Impulse 2 overheated its battery pack during its longest leg in 2015-2016 and therefore pushed the limits of battery technology available at that time. We can now see that both Solar Eagle in the upper right and Solara 50 were chasing FOM targets that were unachievable with the technology available at that time. The progression of the Pareto front shown in red corresponds to what might be a realistic Pareto Front progression by 2020. Airbus Zephyr Next Generation (NG) has already shown with its world record (624 hours endurance) that the upper left target (low payload mass - about 5-10 kg and high endurance of 600+ hours) is feasible. There are currently no plans for a Solar Impulse 3, which could be a non-stop solar-electric circumnavigation with one pilot (and an autonomous co-pilot) which would require a non-stop flight of about 450 hours. A next generation E-Fan aircraft with an endurance of about 2.5 hours (all electric) also seems within reach for 2020. Then in green we set a potentially more ambitious target Pareto Front for 2030. This is the ambition of the 2SEA technology roadmap as expressed by strategic driver 1. We see that in the upper left the Solara 50 project which was started by Titan Aerospace, then acquired by Google, then cancelled, and which ran from about 2013-2017 had the right targets for about a 2030 Entry-into-Service (EIS), not for 2020 or sooner. The target set by Solar Eagle was even more utopian and may not be achievable before 2050 according to the 2SEA roadmap.

Technical Model

In order to assess the feasibility of technical (and financial) targets at the level of the 2BV roadmap it is necessary to develop a technical model. The purpose of such a model is to explore the design tradespace and establish what are the active constraints in the system. The first step can be to establish a morphological matrix that shows the main technology selection alternatives that exist at the first level of decomposition, see the figure below.

Financial Model

The figure below contains a sample NPV analysis underlying the 2BV roadmap.

List of R&T Projects and Prototypes

In order to select and prioritize R&D (R&T) projects we recommend using the technical and financial models developed as part of the roadmap to rank-order projects based on an objective set of criteria and analysis.

Key Publications, Presentations and Patents

Ballistic vest comprehensive list of publications, presentations and key patents.

Our technology of choice is the ballistic material used in soft body armor.

The analysis on patent and paper is focused on these two areas, (1) Area 1: what materials can improve soft body armor’s ballistic performance? And getting a material, what structure of the body armor would maximize the material properties?

(2) Area 2: what material properties governs the ballistic performance?

Patent analysis When coming to materials, it is necessary to analyze both material and process. In the soft body armor material history, two patents have been remarkably important.

Patent 1: Hill HW Jr, Kwolek SL, Morgan PW. Polyamides from reaction of aromatic diacid halide dissolved in cyclic nonaromatic oxygenated organic solvent and an aromatic diamine, US3,006,899, DuPont, 1957.

Technology Strategy Statement

A technology roadmap should conclude and be summarized by both a written statement that summarizes the technology strategy coming out of the roadmap as well as a graphic that shows the key R&D investments, targets and a vision for this technology (and associated product or service) over time.