There has been extensive news coverage in the science press about a research team headed by Jae-Hwang Lee, mechanical and industrial engineering, which reports in Science magazine that it has carried out miniature ballistic tests by firing tiny silica spheres at sheets of graphene, a material that could be used to make new and improved bulletproof vests. The researchers reported that atom-thick layers of this material can be stronger than steel when it comes to absorbing impacts. Graphene consists of a sheet of single atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. See Scientific American, Laboratory News [U.K.], Physics World, Engineering.com, ECN magazine, Innovations Report [Germany], Science Newsline, Armed Forces International News, Science Daily, Techanalyst.co, Controlled Environments magazine, Space Daily, Phys.org, Extremetech.com, Tech Times, Discovery.com, BBC, Innovation Toronto, Betawired.com, Azonano.com.
“This is the first experimental demonstration that the natural material graphene can actually perform 10 times more efficiently than what steel does in the protection against a supersonic projectile,” said Lee about his Science article. “Moreover, it turns out that graphene can even surpass a highly engineered Kevlar armor fabric in double score.”
The title of the Science article is “Dynamic Mechanical Behavior of Multilayer Graphene via Supersonic Projectile Penetration,” which describes research indicating that “multilayer graphene efficiently dissipates the kinetic energy of a penetrating micro-projectile.” (January 2015)