New super material technology can stop a speed bullet

Scientists at Rice University have been working with a nanostructure material that can not only stop bullets, but can also seal the hole that the bullet made as it entered the material. This could mean cheaper, lighter, and more effective body armor for soldiers and police, as well as new, more damage-resistant materials for aerospace, and maybe even automobile manufacturing.

The researchers fired tiny microbullets made of silica at a gel made of polystyrene-polydimethylsiloxane diblock-copolymer, which has alternating 20-nanometer-thick glassy and rubbery layers, to test the copolymers' ability to dissipate the energy of the impacts. Using such tiny projectiles concentrates their effects on a much smaller surface area, so that even though the force of the impact is very small, the energy of the impacts turns out to be very large — over 750 times the energy of a normal bullet impact.

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When the microbullets hit the copolymer material, they were completely stopped, and left no damage to the material itself.

"The polymer has actually arrested the bullet and sealed it," said Rice materials scientist Ned Thomas, according to Rice News, while holding a hockey puck-sized piece of the copolymer with three bullets firmly embedded. "There's no macroscopic damage; the material hasn't failed; it hasn't cracked. You can still see through it. This would be a great ballistic windshield material."

"We want to find out why this polyurethane works the way it does. Theoretically, no one understood why this particular kind of material — which has nanoscale features of glassy and rubbery domains — would be so good at dissipating energy," he added.

The energy-absorption abilities of this material make taking a cross-section no easy feat, as it can literally take days to cut through it. The payoff is quite worth the extra effort, though.

"After the impact we can go in and cross-section the structure and see how deep the bullet got, and see what happened to these nice parallel layers," said Thomas. "They tell the story of the evolution of penetration of the projectile and help us understand what mechanisms, at the nanoscale, may be taking place in order for this to be such a great, high-performance, lightweight protection material."

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The next stages of the research will involve testing other nanostructure materials, with the goal of ultimately creating new metamaterials for various purposes.