A Startup Company Has Invented a Lightweight Bulletproof Fabric Like Nothing Ever Made

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A startup company has invented a lightweight bulletproof fabric like nothing ever made before. I’m Pye Chamberlayne for Tech Front.

Bob Muller runs a company founded by his late father that makes stuff for cops and soldiers. The first product was a battering ram that only weighed fortyfive pounds but has a trick silent gunpowder charge that packs a punch of forty THOUSAND pounds. He got the idea from a cop show segment where a guy couldn’t kick a door in. Now Muller’s got some new stuff.

Muller: “My new product is a level 3 soft-armor fabric which means it’s capable of stopping high powered rifle rounds. Current soft armor materials are not able to do it at a comfortable wearing level. Basically they need about fifteen pounds per square foot which makes you look like the Michelin Man, very heavy, basically uncomfortable.”

That can do more than make GIs sweat, that can KILL them if they chose to leave them off and many chose to do so, not just because they’re uncomfortable but also because the armor makes cops and soldiers function less efficiently. Muller says his product is a lot lighter than what the military is using now to stop rifle rounds.

Muller: “The military right now in order to stop these rounds is wearing five point one pounds per square foot of ceramic plate. We’re able to stop those rounds at one point nine pounds per square foot.”

That’s two hundred sixty percent lighter than body armor American soldiers in Iraq are wearing. More on Body armor when Tech Front continues, after this

Bob Muller’s company Fenrir – F-E-N-R-I-R – has produced a new bulletproof fabric, that’s not just two and a half times lighter than what the military is using now but does not trap heat like the ceramic plate soldiers get now.

By the way, using ceramics to stop bullets is not as stupid as it sounds. It’s not using something like porcelain dinner plates or bathroom which are so brittle a twenty-two short bullet could shatter them. Armor-grade ceramic is made of alumina and does make bullets bounce – but it gets HOT:

Muller: “Well the plate doesn’t breathe. Besides being heavy, hard, rigid, air doesn’t permeate through it obviously.”

Because the Fenrir cloth is woven of threads of titanium and a composite material that is basically Kevlar, it allows air to pass through it:

Muller: Because ours is a woven fabric it breathes just like, you know, a heavy coat, but at least it does allow air and humidity transfer through it.

So far all of this cloth has been handmade. Now it has to be fabricated on high-speed power looms. The next stage of bringing this stuff online and onto the bodies of troops and police is financial. The material will cost about a thousand dollars a yard and is correspondingly expensive to make. In my next report I’ll discuss how the money is being raised how it will be spent and uses other than bulletproof vests for the cloth. For Homeland Defense Radio Dot.com, I’m Pye Chamberlayne.

There’s a new bulletproof cloth that’s lighter and less hot than existing body armor. I’m Pye Chamberlayne. I’ll have details on Tech Front.