The Spectra vs. Kevlar Discusion
Posted by Marcos Santana on January 6th, 2009
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Over the years, many improvements have been made in military and police garments to increase safety and create bullet proof body armor that is both comfortable and protective. However, in the past, being safe has meant a certain amount of bulk and discomfort, as well as added weight and mass for soldiers and officers facing combat on the battle fields and in urban wars. The use of Kevlar, a registered trademark of DuPont, has made body armor lighter and easier to work with, but flexibility has still been a problem.
However today a new material called SPECTRA has been released on the market and SPECTRA is more flexible, lighter and stronger than KEVLAR. This new substance is changing the face of bullet proof wear for police and the military, but what are the differences and the big advantages of SPECTRA?
Kevlar is a high strength, high performance fiber that, despite its many years of use in bullet proof clothing, is still not entirely understood. If we examine the structure of the two we see that Kevlar is made from a high strength and high performance fiber. The idea behind using this as a bullet proof material was to stack several layers of the material together in a weave pattern. A more or less exact description is difficult but you should try to see it is that the molecules form into sheets that then stack themselves around the center of a fiber like spokes.
In the past when bullets had less velocity and were not constructed from extremely hard materials, Kevlar did a fine job. When a bullet hit a bullet proof vest the different layers of Kevlar reduced the velocity and flatted the bullet while braking layer after layer. This was a very effective way to stop those bullets but today bullets are made of harder materials and the technically very advanced weaponry give the bullets a very high speed.
Kevlar vests are stretched to their limits and beyond by modern day weapons and bullets and from time to time they get penetrated completely by very forceful guns. The only way to solve this problem with Kevlar is to add more layers of Kevlar to the material resulting again in bulky, heavier and less flexible bullet proof vests.
Since Spectra is a completely new and different technology , there is no need for layers due to the fact that Spectra is not a woven fabric. It is about 40% more lighter than Kevlar which makes it very useful for comfortable bullet proof vests
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