Testing of Body Armor Materials Phase III (2012) / Chapter Skim
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. This GAO report, as well as other observations -- for example, the Army Audit Agency report to the Program Executive Officer Soldier on Body Armor Testing (AAA, 2009)
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The committee will also consider any other issues associated with body armor testing that the committee considers relevant, including issues raised in the Government Accountability Office Report -- -Warfighter Support, Independent Expert Assessment of Body Armor Test Results and Procedures Needed Before Fielding (GAO -10119) .The committee will prepare a final report.
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Review and comment on methodologies and technical approaches to military helmet testing. Consider the possibility of combining various national body armor testing standards.
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To avoid the need to use high-speed photography, which was expensive at that time, clay was selected as an alternative and is used today as the medium for recording the BFDs in body armor testing. RP #1 in its current formulation is the standard recording medium for testing, even though there are imperfect correlations between existing medical data and the BFD testing approach.
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A clay working group consisting of interested government and civilian experts from the body armor testing community is working to develop a near-term replacement clay that can meet the calibration specification of the column drop test at ambient temperature and whose properties are little affected by temperature. Recommendation 4-1: The Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, and the Army should continue to expedite the development of a replacement for the current Roma Plastilina #1 oil-based modeling clay that can be used at room temperature.
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Further, the volumes of cavities formed in the drop tests and the live-fire tests differ significantly. The testing community would benefit greatly from devising an alternative to the column drop test and certifying the validity of the current drop tests for calibration.
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Overall, instrumented electronic sensor response elements are in a primitive state for the evaluation and assessment by medical researchers of ballistic BABT with rifle round threats. They also are too costly to be used in high-volume production testing.
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PREPUBLICATION DRAFT -- SUBJECT TO EDITORIAL CORRECTION Medium-Term FIGURE S-1 Road map showing suggested near-term actions, medium-term research needs, and a long-term goal to develop a more consistent backing material and a more reliable process for evaluating hard armor. The color coding shows "highest priority" items in red text with "high priority" actions in orange.
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in body armor testing. Similarly, any other software selections that could cause relevant changes to BFD measurements should be studied.
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During the course of the committee's research and deliberations, the DOT&E, Army, and USSOCOM have endeavored to establish statistically principled test standards that are realistically achievable with the current body armor designs. The committee found these collaborative efforts to be commendable.
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Recommendation 6-1: The Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) should continue to conduct due diligence to carefully and completely assess the effects, large and small, of its statistical protocol as it is adopted across the body armor testing community.
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Recommendation 6-4: The Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, the Army, and the United States Special Operations Command should work together to arrive at an acceptable set of test standards for lot acceptance testing that is both statistically principled and is realistically achievable with current body armor designs. HELMET TESTING A specific tasking for Phase III of the study was to provide ideas for future improvement of helmet testing.
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This headform and procedure has potential as a near-term alternative to testing using the National Institute of Justice clay head form tested at elevated clay temperatures. MEDICAL BASIS FOR FUTURE BODY ARMOR TESTING Much is to be gained by applying medical knowledge to body armor design and test processes.
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Cadaveric Experiments for Behind-Armor Blunt Trauma Although there are several studies using animal and cadaveric experiments to study BABT injuries for hard body armor, the committee found that the current work does not allow the development of a thoracic BABT injury criterion from existing studies. Additional animal and/or cadaveric experimentation is necessary to develop a BABT injury criterion.
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and with epidemiology and medical outcomes in the soldier. The studies should ensure that velocity and backface deformation regimes replicate those for current and future desired body armor testing protocols.
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This should include collection of both injury and noninjury events and should be similar to the federal crash databases used by the Department of Transportation -- for example, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the National Automotive Sampling System for traffic injuries/fatalities, including injuries induced by both penetrations and backface deformations. Recommendation 8-6: Using experimentally determined links to injury, response, and epidemiology, the Army should ensure that the clay or other alternative test methodology for hard body armor has humanlike dynamic response and is suitable for the development of behind-armor blunt trauma injury criteria.
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PREPUBLICATION DRAFT -- SUBJECT TO EDITORIAL CORRECTION FIGURE S-2 Road map showing suggested near-term and medium-term research needs, and a long-term goal to provide the fundamental medical basis for injury risk assessment behind helmets and hard body armor.
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The committee agreed that the original ad hoc clay working group could be expanded to form DoD's portion of the national body armor testing standardization committee recommended in the Phase II report. The committee's last recommendation is conceptually the same as Recommendation 15 in the Phase II report (NRC, 2010)
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, in collaboration with the military services, unified commands, government testing organizations, NIJ certified testing laboratories, medical researchers and governmental and commercial material developers should convene a national body armor testing standard committee to review all appropriate considerations and develop recommendations that could lead to updated national body armor configurations and testing standards for body armor and helmet testing.
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