Development of effective body armor requires careful testing to ensure that the armor is fully capable of defeating ballistic threats within its protection class. While post-testing analysis can determine whether the armor successfully prevented ballistic penetration, the danger of blunt force trauma injuries due to displacement of the armor rear surface are far harder to assess with these methods. To address the Defense Health Agency (DHA) need for a sensitive, high bandwidth system for measuring armor rear surface displacements, Hedgefog Research Inc. (HFR) proposes to develop a new Flexible Armor Impact Measurement System (FLAIMS) based on our proprietary flexible displacement sensing technology. Utilizing a sensitive displacement sensor array fabricated on a flexible substrate, FLAIMS will allow for sub-millimeter resolution displacement sensing while maintaining a measurement bandwidth in excess of 100 kHz. Accompanying software will transform the data from the sensor array into full 3D maps of armor surface displacement and extract relevant kinematic parameters from the data. In Phase I HFR will demonstrate the feasibility of the FLAIMS technology and begin development of the data analysis software.
