Development of Oxygen-Plasma-Surface-Treated UHMWPE Fabric Coated with a Mixture of SiC/Polyurethane for Protection against Puncture and Needle Threats

Abstract

Although considerable research has been directed at developing materials for ballistic protection, considerably less has been conducted to address non-firearm threats. Even fewer studies have examined the incorporation of particle-laden elastomers with textiles for spike, knife, and needle protection. We report on a new composite consisting of ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) fabric impregnated with nanoparticle-loaded elastomer, specifically designed for spike- and needle-resistant garments. Failure analysis and parametric studies of particle-loading and layer-count were conducted using a mixture of SiC and polyurethane at 0, 30, and 50 wt.%. The maximum penetration resistance force of a single-layer of uncoated fabric increased up to 218–229% due to nanoparticle loading. Multiple-layer stacks of coated fabric show up to 57% and 346% improvement in spike puncture and hypodermic needle resistance, respectively, and yet were more flexible and 21–55% thinner than a multiple-layer stack of neat fabric (of comparable areal density). We show that oxygen-plasma-treatment of UHMWPE is critical to enable effective coating.

Use of Artificial Neural Networks to Optimize Stacking Sequence in UHMWPE Protections

“…The activation functions are tangent sigmoid for input and hidden layers. These activation functions were selected because they are widely used and universally proven approximators [ 17 , 26 , 34 ]: …”

“…The design of soft armors should take in consideration multi-threats like handgun calibers, shrapnel and/or protection against stabbing. Thus, finding the best combination of different UHMWPE plies to provide this kind of protection is the main concern of military industry [ 17 ]. There is a gap between industrial problems and scientific literature approaches in this topic because industry needs tools to find the best configuration under each threat, while academic researchers are studying the problem mainly with experimental and numerical methods that cannot be used to compare too many configurations.…”

Evaluating the effectiveness of coating knitted fabrics with silica nanoparticles for protection from needle-stick injuries

“…Needle penetration test. Hypodermic needle penetration tests were performed similarly to a previous study [43] and in accordance with ASTM F2878-10 [44]. Briefly, the fabric sample was held firmly between the supporting fixture and another plate with the same open internal diameter of 20 mm.…”

Influence of Plasma-Chemical Treatment of Uhmwpe Fibers on the Degree of Swelling of Polymeric Composite Materials Based on Polyurethane.

“…Low-temperature plasma processing at reduced pressure uses sufficiently clean process gases, the base pressure of which must be below 0.01 Mbar (achieved using a two-stage vacuum pump, prevacuum, rotary, vane type, oil-free ("clean") pump, or a combination of these pumps with vacuum) (Spyrides, Alencastro, Guimaraes, Bastian, Simao, 2019;Firouzi, Ching, Rizvi, Selvaganapathy, 2019;Kumar, Yap, Samsudin, Khan, Srinivasa, 2016;Rajendra Prasad, Prakash, Manjunath, 2007;Sergeeva, Zheltukhin, Abdullin, 2011).…”