Numerous types of non-penetrating, kinetic energy munitions have been developed and deployed throughout both the military and law enforcement communities. The ability to evaluate the injury potential associated with this class of munitions has presented itself as a novel problem for the scientific community. Although several evaluation methods have been employed, currently there is no widely accepted method for evaluating injury levels resulting from blunt impact derived from nonlethal projectiles. This paper briefly reviews two existing experimental techniques in addition to introducing a third. Data obtained from each of these procedures was collected, for similar impacts, and is offered for comparison. BACKGROUND Ballistic Resistance of Police Body Armor Along with the deployment of soft body armor, for civilian law enforcement, came the requirement to establish a method to evaluate the performance claims of various manufacturers. As an entity under the Department of Justice, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is chartered to assist with law enforcement issues at a national level. In response, the NIJ established a consortium of military and medical personnel, with expertise in the areas of wound ballistics and blunt trauma, to collect and correlate all existing data regarding blunt impact injury. The results of this study represented a comprehensive assembly of available animal data and was published as "Body Armor-Blunt Trauma Data". 1 This report also attempted to correlate the identified data using various combinations of parameters. Although no one set of parameters was able to accurately discriminate all data points, a reasonable fit was accomplished using a four parameter model which included; projectile mass (gm), velocity (m/s), diameter (cm), and target mass (kg). This model was then extrapolated from the mass of the target animals to that of a typical adult male (70 kg). Incorporated into the plot of Figure 1 are solid discriminant lines, each having a slope of one, which divide the graph into three regions. The X and Y intercepts for these lines were then determined by data fitting. The three areas; a zone of low lethality, a zone of mixed results, and a zone of high lethality were due to data scatter, a simple live/die outcome, and inconsistencies between the data sets. In addition, dotted lines depicting 40 mm and 80 mm diameter projectiles are included for reference.-(12.6 13.0
This study compares the results of a dispersion test with mathematical modeling. A 10-round group of modified 25-mm XM881 Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot projectiles was fired from the M242 chain gun into a designated target. The mathematical modeling results come from BALANS, a product of Arrow Tech Associates. BALANS is a finite-element lumped parameter code that has the capability to model a flexible projectile being fired from a flexible gun. It also has the unique feature of an automated statistical evaluation of dispersion. This study represents an effort to evaluate a simulation approach with experiment.
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