Material selection on laser sintered stab resistance body armor

Stab resistant body armor (SRBA) is essential defensive equipment to protect the human body from injury due to stabbing. The conventional SRBAs are heavy and inflexible. Therefore a new type of SRBA has been recently developed using Laser Sintering (LS), which has resulted in a substantial improvement to SRBA in terms of structure and material design. In this development, carbon fiber was employed in the polyamide matrix to obtain the optimal stab resistant performances. Four kinds of materials were used and showed that the polyamide/carbon fiber (PA/CF) composite improved the stab resistance property compared to pure polyamide (PA). The stab resistance performances of flat plates were weaker than structured plates. The penetration depth of the PA/CF structured plate was 2 mm less than the pure PA structured plate. SEM observations of the products confirmed experimental conclusions that the addition of the CF largely improved the plate stab resistance. Moreover, using the PA/CF structured plate to produce SRBA would reduce the weight of the product by 30-40% comparing to the conventional SRBA, which would greatly reduce the physical burden to the wearer and largely improve the chance that the armor would be used.