Open Access Open Access  Restricted Access Subscription or Fee Access

The Overmatching of Military Soft Body Armour: Preliminary Results

J. DE FRIEND, D. J. CARR, M. TEAGLE, D. MILLER, A. MABBOTT, E. A. LEWIS

Abstract


Modern military soft body armour provides protection from fragmenting munitions, which are the major cause of injury in warfare. Protection from high-velocity (rifle) ammunition is usually provided by ceramic faced / composite backed plates. There is a growing interest in what happens when body armour is overmatched i.e. it is perforated by a threat that it is not designed to protect the user from. In this work, a military soft body armour was overmatched with 7.62x39 ammunition (steel core, lead nose; produced in 1983; Sellier and Bellot, Zbrojovka Vlàsim, Czechoslovakia). The target was a combination of swine tissue (skin, underlying tissue, ribs) - gelatine (10 % by mass) - swine tissue (ribs, underlying tissue, ribs). The impact velocity varied between 524 m/s and 547 m/s (equivalent to an engagement distance of ~180-200 m). This paper considers whether the body armour affected damage caused to the target during an overmatching event.

Full Text:

PDF