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. 2021 Mar 29;13(7):1077.
doi: 10.3390/polym13071077.

The Use of Laminates of Commercially Available Fabrics for Anti-Stab Body-Armor

Nguyen Quang Khuyen  1 , Phan Vu Duc Han  2 , Ngoc Tuan Nguyen  2 , Quoc Bao Le  1 , Madis Harjo  3 , Gholamreza Anbarjafari  4 , Rudolf Kiefer  1 , Tarmo Tamm  3
Affiliations

The Use of Laminates of Commercially Available Fabrics for Anti-Stab Body-Armor

Nguyen Quang Khuyen et al. Polymers (Basel). .

Abstract

Modern personal protective armor has been generally based on the Kevlar fabrics, with the main goal to offer defense against bullets. In addition to the high cost and poor processability, Kevlar has the disadvantage of limited stab-proofing capability. On the other hand, a large number of crimes involving deadly injures represent knife attacks. Our goal in this work was to investigate composites based on traditional commercially available fabrics of linen and silk, using different adhesives-polymers for forming laminates. The silk composites also contained different amounts of in-woven polyester. Three different water-based adhesives of polyurethane, urea formaldehyde and polyvinyl alcohol were considered. It was found, that besides the strength of the fabrics themselves, the adhesives polymers played a crucial role in the obtained performance of the laminates. The laminates were characterized in their mechanical properties, as well as with scanning electron microscopy and FTIR spectroscopy.

Keywords: adhesives; laminates; linen; shore hardness; soft and hard silk.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Scheme 1
Scheme 1
The chemical structure of the adhesives of polyurethane (PU), Urea-Formaldehyde (UF) and poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA).
Figure 1
Figure 1
Laminates (20 layers) using PVA adhesives on (a) linen, (b) soft silk and (c) hard silk.
Figure 2
Figure 2
SEM images (scale bar 500 μm) with insets of adhesive impregnations with PU, PVA and UF (scale bar 20 μm) (a) linen, (b) soft silk and (c) hard silk.
Figure 3
Figure 3
FTIR spectra (4000–400 cm−1) of the fabrics (a) linen, (b) soft silk and (c) hard silk without (black) and with the addition of the adhesives: PU (red), UF (blue) and PVA (green). The magnification of peaks in (d) are shown in for linen (1) at the 1736–1721 range and for the soft silk (2) and hard silk (3) with adhesives PU, UF and PVA at 1238 cm−1.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Sheets of linen (black), soft silk (red) and hard silk (blue) showing in (a) strain-stress curve, and in (b) tensile bond strength applied with different adhesives (PU, UF and PVA).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Shore D hardness (HA) of textile laminates with different adhesives: PU (■, black), UF (●, red) and PVA (★, blue) and fabrics 8–20 layers; (a) linen, (b) soft silk and (c) hard silk. The dashed lines represent the linear fits and are shown here for orientation only.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Manual stabbing test. (a) the laminate HS (20 layers, UF adhesive), (b) the knife position before stab, (c) the stab into the fabric and (d) the backside showing no penetration of the blade.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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