DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF FUSED DEPOSITION MODELING TEXTILE GEOMETRICAL FEATURES FOR STAB RESISTANT APPLICATION

Abstract

Body armour plays a vital role to provide protection to the law enforcement and correctional officers around the world who are significantly working at risk of encountering assault in daily routine. Despite many modern fiber-based soft body armours have been developed, yet a number of historical issues continue to exist and challenge the current protective solutions. In fact, additive manufacturing (AM) presents a great design freedom and advantages in developing customized user fit lightweight product or part, it also reduces the amount of labour costs, operation time and material waste. This research therefore investigates the feasibility of using AM system to manufacture textile geometrical models, which can be used for the development of novel user fit stab–resistant body armour. Prior to the actual experiments, this paper presents the finite element analysis of a planar and five cross-sectional design of textile models that will be additive manufactured with Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) system utilizing the commonly used materials such as Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) and Polycarbonate-ABS (PC-ABS) blend. A comparative analysis is performed between both materials. The purpose of this paper is basically to investigate the relationship between the cross-sectional design of textile models and their protective performance against stabbing. Firstly, a planar model and five textile model with different imbricate scale-linked designs were modeled with a CAD software. These models were simulated tested by a test blade using ANSYS software. The specification of test blade was taken from NIJ Standard-0115.00. The comparative result shows that PC-ABS has better performance to resist the knife threat than ABS due to the addition of ABS provides not only other useful properties, yet reduces the limitations of PC and at the same times without removing other superior mechanical properties. The result shows the knife penetration through the planar model was much larger than the imbricate scale-linked design models. The design of model 5 was the most appropriate as compared to other designs, which the maximum total deformation distributed on its cross section area was the lowest. This implies that the design of model 5 can be used in the experiment later and it might contribute high stab resistant towards the knife threat with impact energy of 24 Joules.