Scientists are always looking for the next best thing for keeping people safe. One of their favorite design approahces is stealing ideas from nature. For example, scientists are using spider webs to create a form of Kevlar, while others are copying a gecko's hand pads to create a tool for climbing windowed structures. The most recent attempt is trying to use a fish scale pattern to create bulletproof armor.
One major problem in body armor design is the weight and flexibility. In order for a piece of armor to protect a wearer from bullets, it tends to be heavy and burdensome. However, a team from MIT is attempting to use 3D-printed fish scales to create a lighter and more effective body armor. According to the team, the armor would have increased "protecto-flexibility," a metric that the team invented in order to "[capture] the contrasting combination of protection and flexibility, taken as the ratio between the normalized indentation and normalized bending stiffness," reports Popular Science.
The theory of "scale armor" isn't new. It's an ancient concept that armorers and weaponsmiths have played with for years. What makes this particular set of armor unique is the MIT team's decision to 3-D print all parts of the armor, which created a new level of protecto-flexibility that other sets of body armor haven't attempted before.
The research is currently receiving support from the U.S. Army Research Office by way of the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
The armor is currently in early stages of testing and still needs to be tested against bullets and shrapnel. But if the armor holds up to all of MIT's tests, we could see modern-day soldiers wearing scales in the near future.
