Video: Metal Foam Armor Shatters Bullets Into Dust

By R. Siva Kumar - 10 Apr '16 15:46PM

One unique metal foam armor is powerful enough to shatter bullets into pieces after impact, says a team of researchers from North Carolina (NC) State University. Their product's strength was disclosed in a video showed an armor-piercing bullet disintegrating when it comes in contact with the material.

The creation of the armor is from composite metal foams (CMFs), that are lighter than metal vehicle armor. The unique foams can be used in a number of ways outside the body armor, including for space exploration and nuclear shipping waste transport.

Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State University, has developed CMFs and she explains some of its special properties.

In the video, the bullet is 7.62 by 63 millimeters and is able to pierce an M2 armor projectile which was ejected according to some standard procedures outlined by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). Even though it has armor-piercing capabilities, the metal foam armor could destroy it easily.

"We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters," Rabiei said. "To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor."

In addition to body armor, numerous applications can benefit from materials that are extremely light and strong, including the shipment of nuclear waste and space exploration, which require materials with ideal strength, weight and radiation protection.

Hence, the CMF body armor is shown to be effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation, and also demonstrating that they can withstand heat and fire twice as well as the standard metals that they are made of.

The findings were published in the July 2015 issue of the journal Composite Structures.