Micrometeoroid and Orbital Debris Enhancements of Shuttle Extravehicular Mobility Unit Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment

MMOD Puncture Resistance of EVA Suits with Shear Thickening Fluid (STF) – Armortm Absorber Layers

“…Given that the Kevlar ® used was a correctional style with a tight weave and thinner yarns, the penetrating debris particles themselves were most likely sufficiently small such that they did not possess enough residual kinetic energy to puncture the bladder cloth. Finally, we can qualitatively compare these results to previous reports in literature and show that the lighter, thinner STF-Armor TM lay-ups investigated in this work show comparable performance to the standard EVA suit configuration [21].…”

“…Figure 3 shows a schematic of the standard EVA suit lay-up along with the prototype lay-up containing STF-Armor TM . The standard EVA lay-up employs two layers of neoprene-coated nylon to absorb the debris cloud [3]. In the prototype layups investigated in the present work, the two absorber layers used were a commercially available STF-treated correctional Kevlar ® style 1148 (300 denier, 59 x 59 yarns per inch) from Barrday (Cambridge, Ontario, Canada).…”

“…Our test material lay-ups are based on the design of a standard EVA lay-up reported by ILC Dover [3]. The outer Orthofabric layer serves as a sacrificial bumper layer where incoming hypervelocity particles are shocked into a high energy state with the aim of fragmenting, melting, or in the best case scenario, vaporizing the projectile.…”

“…HVI testing was conducted following the protocols previously reported [21]. Test article were nominally 4" x 4" in dimension and held between two aluminum target frames with shims as shown in Figure 5.…”