Bioinspiration Example II - Body armour inspired by the skin

Body armour inspired by fish scales could lead to new flexible materials for uniforms that can withstand bullets and knife attacks. Scientists have been using three dimensional printing to help develop a new type of armour that is both light weight and strong. Professor Stephan Rudykh, head of the mechanics of soft materials laboratory at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, was inspired by the scaly skin of fish. He said that while fish have an outer layer of hard scales, their skin remains flexible due to a soft elastic layer beneath. Their "secret" is the combination of the scales and the soft tissue beneath them, and that is what I tried to mimic here. The materials that he is designing are also made of two layers – one soft (the ‘body’) and the other (‘scales’) - constitutes the ‘armor’. These two components provide the combined property of protecto-flexibility that is required from an armor.

Body armour

Figure 1 shows an example of body armor available in the market. In this new invention, body armors were made of rigid plates that were attached to each other which were low in maneuverability. MIT and Technion created multiple layers of rigidity and flexibility that look just like the real fish scale. The body armour is made of stiff plates and it is attached to a highly flexible under layer.  The armor prototype was designed to maximize the wearer’s ability to move unencumbered while providing significantly more protection than standard Kevlar body armor.