Vlog: Armour Integrity Monitoring System
By: Bede O’Neill
Business Development Consultant, Defence
4th May 2018
Body armour worn by soldiers can become damaged through accidental collisions and knocks. In most cases, visual inspection of the armour surface is insufficient in ascertaining its integrity and, as a precautionary measure, the armour is shipped back to the OEM for extensive X-Ray analysis.
In our first vlog, Bede discusses our solution to this problem, how we approached this issue and what we learned.
Transcript
With regards to our new sensor, AIMS – armour integrity monitoring system originally started as an answer to a research call to reduce the 100% need to return the body armour for x-ray analysis. To establish its integrity, you need to send it back to the equipment manufacturer for x-ray analysis, which obviously incurs quite a large cost logistically but also you remove that piece of equipment from service and from circulation so it can’t be used.
There was a research call to understand whether this could be speeded up and whether there was another way of determining the integrity of the ceramic body armour without the need for x-ray analysis. Plextek answered this original research call and put forward quite a novel sensor solution in concept. What we delivered was the ability to understand whether the plate had been fractured or not.
The sensor system is quite big and needed to be accessed USB port which wasn’t really deemed practical. So we shrunk the concept down to a very small packaged sensor system, almost you would call it a fit and forget, where the interrogation of the sensor is via NFC, near-field communications and that is facilitated by a mobile phone handset, whether that be android or apple.
This allows us or allows the user to interrogate the status of the body armour without the need for specialist software, specialist laptops, leads or cables.
Body armour worn by soldiers can become damaged through accidental collisions and knocks. In most cases, visual inspection of the armour surface is insufficient in ascertaining its integrity and, as a precautionary measure, the armour is shipped back to the OEM for extensive X-Ray analysis.
In our first vlog, Bede discusses our solution to this problem, how we approached this issue and what we learned.
Transcript
With regards to our new sensor, AIMS – armour integrity monitoring system originally started as an answer to a research call to reduce the 100% need to return the body armour for x-ray analysis. To establish its integrity, you need to send it back to the equipment manufacturer for x-ray analysis, which obviously incurs quite a large cost logistically but also you remove that piece of equipment from service and from circulation so it can’t be used.
There was a research call to understand whether this could be speeded up and whether there was another way of determining the integrity of the ceramic body armour without the need for x-ray analysis. Plextek answered this original research call and put forward quite a novel sensor solution in concept. What we delivered was the ability to understand whether the plate had been fractured or not.
The sensor system is quite big and needed to be accessed USB port which wasn’t really deemed practical. So we shrunk the concept down to a very small packaged sensor system, almost you would call it a fit and forget, where the interrogation of the sensor is via NFC, near-field communications and that is facilitated by a mobile phone handset, whether that be android or apple.
This allows us or allows the user to interrogate the status of the body armour without the need for specialist software, specialist laptops, leads or cables.
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