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Engineered clothing

What would a suit-like protective garment weigh and cost, and what limits it?

research/garment-protective

Cunniff-style scaling for nylon, aramid and UHMWPE: at equal weight UHMWPE gives 1.49× aramid's V50 and needs 0.20–0.67× the areal density depending on an unknown exponent; a 3 mm, 1 kg suit-like panel falls short of a 4 kg/m² aramid reference except under optimistic assumptions. Stylised; recalled formula, assumed properties and prices, no protection claim.

8 tests

What it found

A Cunniff-style specific-toughness scaling (U*) for nylon, aramid and UHMWPE with a 0.5 m2 torso-panel mass, cost, thickness and stiffness model. At equal weight UHMWPE gives 1.49× aramid's V50 in this scaling, and needs 0.20–0.67× the areal density depending on an unknown exponent. Under a 3 mm, 1 kg suit-like limit the panel falls short of a 4 kg/m2 aramid reference except for UHMWPE with an optimistic exponent. Stylised: recalled formula, assumed properties and unsourced prices, no ballistic physics and no protection claim.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/garment-protective: areal_density
garment-protective/experiments/areal_density.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.