Design of bioinspired armor for optimum puncture resistance, stability and flexural compliance

Abstract eng:
Flexible natural armors from fish or snakes are attracting an increasing amount of attention from their unique combination of hardness, flexibility and light weight. In particular, the extreme contrast of stiffness between the hard scales and the surrounding soft tissues give rise to unusual and attractive mechanisms, which now serve as model for the design of bio-inspired armors. There is however little guidelines as to the choice of materials, optimum thickness, size, shape and arrangement for the protective scales. In this paper, we present recent experiments and models to explore and characterize the different failure modes of flexible skins reinforced by hard scales and subjected to puncture: flexural and contact fracture, unstable tilt, interactions between scales. We optimized the size, shape and arrangement of the scales which govern these mechanisms to produce synthetic bioinspired armor with optimum combination of resistance to sharp puncture and flexural compliance.

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