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.