Exploring Disentangled Polyethylene Tape as Soft Armour Materials in Various Structural Forms.

Lightweight and thin, soft armour panels (SAPs) with minimum back-face signature (BFS) are desirable for developing bullet-resistant jackets. This research explores the ballistic resistance of different structural forms, namely two-dimensional (2D) woven fabrics, unidirectional (UD) woven fabric laminates, and cross-ply laminates of disentangled ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (DPE) tape used in as-received or twisted tape forms. Three SAPs were prepared from laminates made from two woven fabrics of twisted tape and cross-ply laminate of untwisted tape. All SAP areal density fixed in the range of 4.5 ± 0.3 kg.m⁻². In ballistic test (9 × 19 mm bullet), SAPs made from twisted tape got perforated due to high stress concentration and slower wave propagation. SAP made from DPE tape with the lowest areal density was not perforated by the bullet (430 m·s⁻¹) and exhibited perforation ratio and BFS as 0.18 and 22.2 mm, respectively, which are at par with those of SAPs developed from commercially available popular high-performance fibers. Post-impact failure analysis of SAPs at macro- and microscopic scales also supported the superiority of cross-ply laminate of DPE tape over UD woven fabric laminates of twisted tape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]