SBIR-STTR Award

Excera Materials Group, Inc. has developed a novel material for hard ceramic armor strike faces -- ONNEX. This proven material has an unprecedented balance of low specific gravity, high hardness, elastic stiffness, and strength, and has passed Army specifications for lightweight body armor. As a result of these highly successful trials and demonstrated effectiveness, Excera is currently delivering on commercial orders for immediate use in hostile theaters. One of the important advantages of the Excera manufacturing approach is that has the requisite agility to form complex shapes or execute short production runs easily. This manufacturing advantage will be used to form complex multifunctional components that can be integrated into advanced structural designs, including aircraft seats, decks, and bulkheads, that provide significant ballistic protection with minimal compromises in weight over current structural components. The first phase of this program will design and ballistically validate effective armor system architectures that are comprised of ONNEX strike faces, high molecular weight polymer spall shields, and low-density metal foams to diffuse the shock to the impact zone. In the option period, complex shapes and structural components directly representative of aircraft seating will be produced and tested

The proposed program will logically extend the Phase I activity, focusing on Excera’s ONNEX™/BlueStar™ armor technology. Based on a near-net shape process for producing ceramic composite materials, this effort will focus on both enhanced ballistic protection as well as structurally conformal armor for use in aircraft. Efforts focused on the former will leverage the efforts of concurrent DoD programs targeting reduced weight, protection against more aggressive rounds and improved multi-strike performance. Tailoring and optimizing the ceramic composite microstructure to enhance the specific ballistic goals of the program will achieve this. Additionally, Excera will work with armor system integrators to reduce the integrated system weight via novel backing assemblies. Efforts to refine the structurally conformal armor system demonstrated during the Phase I effort will focus on a NAVAIR selected application. Excera, working closely with selected armor/vehicle integrators, will integrate the results from the ballistic performance efforts into a shaped armor system using its proprietary Tool-Free Forming (TFF) process. TFF allows the fabrication of complex/custom armor shapes without application specific tooling. The completed armor system will be subjected to live fire testing and airworthiness requirements (AWR) per the request of NAVAIR.

Keywords:
Structural Armor, Ballistic Armor, Ceramic, Composite, Near-Net Shape, Boron Carbide, Silicon Carbide, Lightweight