Division/Committee: [POLY] Division of Polymer Chemistry

Protective materials are critical in everyday life by mitigating many types of danger and reducing risk faced in many professions, such as law enforcement and professional sports. They are also designed for risk and damage mitigation in rockets, automobiles, infrastructure barriers, medical devices, and electronic packaging. Although some commonalities exist, the range of impact energies, impact times, and strain rates requires the development of unique solutions in each industry or application. For instance, during high-rate ballistic impacts, material designs from high strength fibers, fiber composites, and ceramics rapidly deflect tremendous energies. In contrast, helmets and engineered padding protect the brain and extremities from blunt injury during intermediate-rate impact events. With orders-of-magnitude changes in the rate of impact across the application space, no single material can be used ubiquitously. Therefore, layered systems of varying materials (for example, foams and fiber composites) work in concert to dampen, break apart, and decelerate incoming impacts to minimize damage. Across the industry developing better performing materials without increasing weight or costs remains a significant challenge. Currently, the industry relies on established materials to achieve this balance of properties within a system design. However, there have been significant advances in chemistries (e.g. adaptive polymers) and manufacturing techniques (e.g. additive manufacturing) which could enable innovative designs at the system level. The vision for this symposium is to highlight emerging technologies and help bridge the gaps between concept and application for multicomponent protective material systems over two and a half days. We anticipate supporting four different themes throughout the symposium. These themes are (1) advances in structural materials (2) advances in soft materials (3) integration of materials into structures and systems and (4) leveraging data science, machine learning, and AI to support advances in protection. In each of these topic areas, we will organize the sessions to explore novel technologies and discuss current strategies to integrate emerging materials into existing systems. Our goal is to facilitate discussions amongst this community about emerging needs that could provide the foundation for a future ACS POLY workshop examination the path to translational change in protective materials.

Alice Savage

U.S. Army Research Lab

Appearances