Scientists may have come up with a way to make bulletproof armor even more effective thanks to a certain "wonder material."
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Science have found that graphene could take bullet resistant technology forward. The material is ideal and more efficient than current bulletproof vests, as graphene is thinner, more flexible and electrically conducive while still holding tough.
For their study, the researchers carried out a small-scale ballistics tests, firing "microbullets" and lasers at sheets of graphene anywhere from 10 to 100 layers thick.
"We started writing the paper about the petals, but as we went along, it became evident that wasn't really the story," study co-author Edwin Thomas, of an engineer at Rice University, said in a press release. "The bullet's kinetic energy interacts with the graphene, pushes forward, stretches the film and is slowed down.
"For graphene, we calculated the speed at 22.2 kilometers per second, which is higher than any other known material."
Once a research scientist at Rice, Jae-Hwang Lee, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, lead the study with two other Rice researchers. Looking on with an electron microscope, the group found that graphene absorbed the microbullets up to 10 times better than steel.
They noticed that the material had a larger impact area after the fact, but Lee told BBC News that could be remedied by mixing graphene with another material. In addition to its great strength, graphene's biggest advantages appear to be its pliancy.
"The game in protection is getting the stress to distribute over a large area," Thomas said. "It's a race. If the cone can move out at an appreciable velocity compared with the velocity of the projectile, the stress isn't localized beneath the projectile.
"Ideally you would have a lot of independent layers that aren't too far apart or so close that they're touching, because the loading goes from tensile to compressive."
