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. The first three (shown in bold) are used to assess the ballistic vest itself.
