Transparent armor is bulletproof glass in the simplest terms. Spinel is an evolutionary
improvement in transparent armor. What we have been able to do is to reduce the
thickness of that armor by a factor of two
by simply redesigning the architecture using the same materials of the same
weight, we're able to reduce the thickness by a factor which is a huge
impact on the weight. Spinel is on magnesium aluminium oxides
it's an actual crystalline material that ends up looking transparent like a piece
of glass. No one else domestically can make spinel powder better than us.
That's our beauty and we are very confident and we have actually transitioned
our technologies to other companies so they know we can make good powder and
we can make good devices. What we do is turn the powder into a solid
transparent shape that looks like glass. What we use for that is the 50-ton hot
press. The hot press what it does is it acts like a furnace it'll go to 3,600
degrees Fahrenheit and through this hydraulic system it will exert a
50-pound load on the sample. So, we're talking about here is to replace glass
with spinel because it's significantly tougher, stronger, harder than the glass
it's a lot thinner and reduces the weight considerably. And the idea was
typically the bullet goes straight through this a shock wave created and it
literally pulverizes the material ahead of the bullet and it's like a bullet
just traveling through sand. It just goes through very easily,
there's very little resistance. What we'd like to do is to increase that
resistance and we'd like to use more of the material to dissipate that energy so
because we have a background in optics and we understand that if I take a laser
pointer and I have a stack of glass slides and I illuminate
what you'll see reflection of light of every interface so our thought was what
can't we leverage that same concept in a shockwave can't we dissipate shockwave
energy so we redesigned the structure and in fact went ahead and
shot at the material and demonstrated through high-speed videography we were
able to exploit more of the material to absorb that energy by dissipating the
shockwave. We're also looking at the polymers and plastics as certainly in the
case of transparent armor big for us is to reduce the weight to provide
protection against even higher caliber round and so what we had observed was
that we could take existing plastics, existing polymers and through by just
simply redesigning the architecture so not selecting different materials as the
commercially available but take the existing commercial polymer armor but we
redesign the architecture we could provide enhanced protection to the warfighter by that
I mean we reduce the thickness of therefore the weight what we'd like to
do is to marry that technology with spinel as the strike plate to replace
the glass at the front end with our we call it biomimetic armor- the polymer
to combine the two together to provide protection against a higher caliber
round such as a NATO 762 round and to be able to do this by reducing the
weight by a factor of two or more. In the next five to ten years the goal is
really understand the shockwave dissipation mechanism so we
can optimize the transparent armor through clever design the marrying
of spinel ceramic and polymer and the design, the architecture of these so we
can significantly reduce the weight going forward.