Wood isn't what you generally think of when you think about armor to protect soldiers from mortar attacks. But soliders with a National Guard unit in Afganistan will be using wood-based composite armor to line their tents at night, according the University of Maine center where the armor was developed, and recent press reports from the area.
The University of Maine's Advanced Engineered Wood Composites Center developed the armor which is lightweight and portable, making it ideal for situations in which soliders are not going to be stationary long enough to build up stronger defenses such as concrete barriers. The tent armor was tested by the Army's Natick Soldier Systems Center before being shipped off to Afghanistan last month. And an earlier version of the tent panels were demonstrated in Iraq. The panels are a composite of wood, fiberglass and plastic that can withstand mortar fragments traveling at 2,000 feet per second and small arms fire. The panels can be installed with a simple strap system to a tent's aluminum poles by four soldiers in about 20 minutes. The university and the Army are looking for a company to handle full-scale manufacturing of the panels. The Portland Press Herald described how the panels are made in a recent story.
The armor is constructed like a giant sandwich, with 15 to 20 layers of fiberglass that encase a slab made from ground-up poplar or other wood such as southern yellow pine. The sandwich is then pressed like a panini, using 1,800 tons of heated pressure that fuses everything into a super-resistant, half-inch-thick panel. The panel is then coated with a smooth layer of polypropylene.
--Catherine MacRae Hockmuth
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