SBIR-STTR Award

Occupants of ground combat vehicles are at risk of head injury when the vehicle is attacked by an underbody blast and its violent motion causes the head to strike the interior.Occupants are also at risk from spallfragments of material liberated from the interior wall of the vehicle by shock waves or overmatched threats.Vehicles currently have interior liner panels for spall mitigation but lack adequate head protection.Safe, Inc. proposes to combine the spall liner and head protection system into a single solution.The planned work will demonstrate feasibility of the design through testing and Design of Experiments methods intended to reach the thinnest acceptable solution.Thin-ness is needed to avoid further confining the cramped interior space.The selected materials will meet all head impact, spall, acoustic, thermal, and flame, smoke, and toxicity requirements.The improved spall liner uses materials that are readily available at a low cost that will foster commercialization in the ground vehicle market.Safes project team has prior experience developing both ballistic and head impact systems for soldier protection.

When a ground combat vehicle is attacked, the occupants may incur head injury from the ensuing violent motion of the vehicle. Adding a layer of Energy Absorbing (EA) material for head protection is challenging because the occupied space within combat vehicles is already confined. Safe, Inc. proposes to develop the Head Impact Protection Spall Liner (HIPSL) to resolve this problem. Ground combat vehicles need spall liners to protect occupants from fragments ejected when overmatching weapons penetrate the vehicle armor. The HIPSL combines a head impact EA layer with a spall protection layer where each layer is optimized for thinness, allowing both concerns to be resolved within the available space. The proposed work addresses the EA, ballistic, thermal, acoustic, and Flame, Smoke, and Toxicity (FST) concerns with testing arranged to both find the thinnest design and demonstrate its performance against the associated requirements. Extensive use of designed experiments supports optimization.