The body armor for military personnel should provide a balance of protection and comfort. For both men and women, if body armor does not fit correctly and provide adequate coverage, it can adversely affect the safety and effectiveness. The design and manufacture of the body armor for female officers can present issues of particular concern. For now, Romania's female soldiers don't have any other choice than to wear men's body armor of smaller sizes, even though their body shape is different. For many women, that means wearing a standard issue vest that is tight across the torso and too loose around the middle can cause discomfort and offers less protection. The aim of the project was to develop a new protective bullet proof vest that is manufactured taking into account the female body shape, that provides comfort, mobility and adjustment possibilities, while superior ballistic resistance properties will be similar to the existing body armors. For morphological characterization of the target group, the women recruited in the national defense system, it was made an anthropometric survey using 3D scanning technology the human body in order to provide the necessary body size database to design the ballistic body armor. From primary anthropometric data we extracted the body dimensions required in designing the protective bullet proof vests. The novelty in the body armor design consist in taking into account the shape and cup size of Romanian female body. For the determination of the cup size we selected these critical dimensions: bust and under-bust circumferences.

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The present work reveals a comprehensive decontamination study on real and simulated biological and chemical warfare agents (BCWA). The emphasis was on evaluating the antimicrobial activity against real biological warfare agents, such as Bacillus anthracis, and also the capacity of neutralizing real chemical warfare agents, such as mustard gas or soman, by employing three different types of organic solutions enriched with ZnO, TiO2, and zeolite nanoparticles, specially designed for decontamination applications. The capacity of decontaminating BCWA was evaluated through specific investigation tools, including surface monitoring with the swabs method, minimum inhibitory (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) evaluations, time-kill tests for microorganisms, and GC-MS for monitoring chemical agents on different types of surfaces (glass, painted metal, rubber, and cotton butyl rubber). These tests revealed high decontamination factors for BCWA even after only 10 min, accomplishing the requirements imposed by NATO standards. At the completion of the decontamination process, the formulations reached 100% efficacy for Bacillus anthracis after 10–15 min, for soman after 20–30 min, and for mustard gas in an interval comprised between 5 and 24 h depending on the type of surface analyzed.

Ballistic gelatin as simulant of the human body and organs is a support in forensics. After having obtained very good results for a new gelatin-based composite in terms of physicochemical and rheological properties, this study focused on this material's mechanical behavior during stabbing and shooting versus bovine and porcine organs and standard ballistic gelatin. The hybrid gelatin has a predominantly elastic behavior at 23°C, whereas the elastic modulus becomes practically constant in the 10-0.1 Hz frequency range. In terms of stabbing behavior, the small variations obtained between porcine organs and surrogate are below 5%, the perforation indicating a good similarity. From the ballistic test results using 10 × 28T rubber balls, it has been seen that the hybrid ballistic gelatin conducts to more reliable and reproducible values of perforation/penetration versus standard gelatin, making from it a real candidate for use in forensic tests.