 American soldiers in combat carry heavy equipment and personal armor to accomplish the mission and stay safe. The challenge for Army researchers is to design armor protection that is both strong and light. At Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, material scientists and engineers are working on new technology solutions to build the Army of the Future. This is the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory. I'm Chris Hopple. I'm the Program Manager of the Physics of Soldier Protection to Defeat Evolving Threats Essential Research Program. I've been with ARL for over 25 years. I came here right out of grad school. I earned my PhD at Penn State University in Engineering, Science and Mechanics. And my intention when coming here was to be a postdoc for two years and go into teaching. I came here and I found I really love what I do in terms of the research. I've been able to work on new projectile technologies as well as armor for vehicles and the individual soldier. Chris takes us on a tour of one of his labs. So this is one of our small caliber ballistic experimental facilities. This has two ballistic ranges in it where we evaluate the performance of armor. We have different sized guns we can put in here and test different armors. Modernization efforts will leverage science and technology to build the future Army. At the laboratory, scientists and engineers have 10 essential research programs that focus the people and resources to solve specific challenges. Chris leads the ERP known as Physics of Soldier Protection to Defeat Evolving Threats. So tell me what particular problems are you trying to solve under this ERP? So we're developing critical soldier protection technologies to defend soldiers from the next generation of ballistic threats. Threats they're going to be out on the battlefield in the future really designed to defeat body armor. Right now the U.S. field is the best body armor in the world. But near-peer adversaries have threats designed to defeat body armor. We are working on the technologies to provide soldiers protection from those future threats while not placing any additional burden on the soldier. We have to make sure that we stay ahead of our adversaries and develop that next generation of protection. So we're pushing the limits of armor mechanisms, computational design and material science to make improved protection at a lighter weight and less burden to the soldier than current armor technologies. Let's talk about the plans for the ERP. Let's start with the short term. So in the short term we're working to develop and demonstrate ballistic mechanisms to defeat small arms threats in a compact armor package. We're trying to capture the over three kilojoules of kinetic energy in a complex bullet and defeat it in an armor package less than 25 millimeters thick. To do this we're pursuing advancements in materials processing such as advanced ceramics like boron suboxide, blended ceramics and synthetic diamond ceramics to break up the projectile and improvements of the processing of the ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene composite materials which have to capture all that kinetic energy in the end. As part of a systems engineering approach we're also addressing all the requirements that we place on armor like the behind armor blunt trauma requirements. We're looking at the energy that can be transmitted to the soldier behind the armor because that offers us a way to design that armor more effectively and efficiently. So let's talk about long-term plans for this ERP. So we're developing models to capture the full ballistic response of these armor systems the bullet and the penetrator so that we can rapidly design armors as projectiles continue to evolve and get more effective. We're going to be able to defeat those projectiles and we're also going to be able to drive material science and engineering to further develop improved ceramics and composites and utilize these better materials and armor and continue to make armor more effective for the battlefield. In these efforts we're using the Army's high-performance computing centers to model how the projectiles and the armor respond to high rates of loading and we have a unique capability here with the supercomputers available to us that we can effectively model armor simulations that would take years on a single processor. We can model in a matter of days and capture new details about how the ceramics break up during the penetration event and how the bullet can be defeated. So how is the structure of the ERP organized based on the objectives that you want to achieve? The ERP is organized around three thrust areas research in thermobelistic, research in armor materials and research in computational mechanics. The leaders of each of these areas reach out to experts across the community across the Department of Defense, Department of Energy as well as industry and academia to pull in the latest technologies in material science and computational mechanics and thermobelistics and to identify the most promising technologies for armor solutions. From these relationships we bring resources and knowledge into the ERP so that we can operationalize the science in these thrust areas for discovery and delivery to the end user to improve the survivability of the squad as well as the individual warfighter. Are there any highlights to mention or key work being done so far? So we demonstrated early success last September when we demonstrated the first armor to defeat these evolving threats at muzzle velocity. So we now have a prototype armor that we can build on and make more effective against the suite of threats that a soldier may face and then we can use that to insert new materials technology and new mechanisms to make the armor lighter. Last year the initial assessment of the behind armor blunt trauma requirement that we worked with Data Analysis Center to produce was used by General McConville who was the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army at the time to justify a change in the requirements of the armor increasing the back face deformation. That's allowed current body armors to be much lighter than they were a year ago and that's influenced the Army's Vital Torso Protection Program. Can you provide examples of major projects that the ERP is focusing on? So we work closely with the dynamic compression sector of the advanced photon source at Argonne National Laboratories to conduct very high resolution experiments of a ballistic impact. We're able to use their very powerful x-ray systems to look at the interaction of a bullet and an armor sample at very high resolutions at the time understanding how the bullet is deforming and how the ceramic is fracturing to an impact to give us new insight into what's going on in an armor and improve that armor, make it lighter, design the ceramic to more effectively break up the projectile threat and then design the backing and material to catch that debris more effectively. We're working closely with the Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environment Program which is a university consortium led by Johns Hopkins University looking at the influence of material microstructure on the high rate, high pressure response. So this academic consortium gives us access to great insights from professors and students at these universities. It's also given us a great transition in the program as some of the grad students have come to the Army Research Laboratory to work with us and help develop improved materials and improve our knowledge of ballistic sciences. This alliance increases our ability to perform scientific discovery across a broad range of protective materials looking at metals, ceramics, and composites as well as advances in computational design tools for armor applications. Is there any work or milestone or product that you find especially promising at this stage of the ERP? So we've gained great understanding of the ballistic mechanisms in these emerging threats and this knowledge helps shine a path forward for us in ballistics research and material science to really improve the performance of armor. At the same time, the computational efforts have created models that now capture the salient features of the ceramic response which enables these mechanisms and potential threat defeat strategies to be simulated and explored computationally. These models are now integral to armor design. The experiments and the modeling are tied together at every step of the way. We're using the models to understand the experiments better and we're using the experiments to check those models and validate what we're seeing. This coupled approach enables us to really push the boundaries of armor design creating much more effective protection for the soldier. Can you talk about the people you work with here at the laboratory and why they do what they do for the soldier? One of the great strengths of ARL is that shared mission and I think my coworkers are just as passionate as I am about transitioning technology to the soldier and that's tremendously rewarding and that really helps make work more enjoyable. I think everyone here sees the mission and the need of what we do and they're fun to work with and that's really part of the benefit of this whole program is being able to do something that you know is important and having a very dedicated staff focused on that problem. What we learned today is a podcast about the science and technology behind the Army of Tomorrow. Please like, subscribe, and share to get the word out about what Army researchers are doing to make America's soldiers stronger and safer. In future episodes, we'll meet with other project managers of the lab's essential research programs and find out what they're doing to discover, innovate, and transition technology solutions to the soldier. Thanks for joining us. For the CCDC Army Research Laboratory, I'm Tracy Dean.