Bulletproof

New tech for new times

By Jess Kilby

There are societal values inherent in all technological advances, regardless of whether we like to admit it. Some inventions or discoveries spawn clear-cut camps of opposition and support — stem-cell research, for example. Cell phones. Peer-to-peer file-trading networks. Abortion. The Segway. Whether you’re liberal or conservative, a gadget geek or a traditionalist, the argument is clear and you generally know where you stand.

But along comes something like the technology currently being developed by Tex Tech of North Monmouth, and it gives a liberal geek like me pause. It’s not Tex Tech’s product that poses the ideological question, though — it’s the fact that there’s even a need for the product. More specifically, that it has civilian applications.

What is this troubling innovation? It’s just a better bulletproof shield. Using Kevlar–like fibers and a new generation of resins, Tex Tech has created a composite that can absorb military-grade ammunition, whereas older ballistic shields could only neutralize your average hand gun.

Tex Tech won’t go into too much detail about its latest project (the composites field is pretty competitive), but New Market Development Manager Dave Erb offers a simplified description.

“It’s a plate, and if you were to touch it with your hands and bang on it, it would be like a hard panel — it would be rugged and hard and stiff,” he says. “But when a bullet hits it, it has a very high elongation. So the resin system gives a lot, and it stretches.”

Though this sounds simple and logical enough, Erb says creating a substance like this is harder than it seems.

“The thing here is to try to develop a material that has structural capability and ballistic capability,” he says. “And there’s a dichotomy there in materials science, because a lot of times structural materials don’t make the best ballistic materials. For example, Kevlar vests are soft, kind of, and they capture the [ammunition] round in the cloth, but when you want to try to make something structural, the ballistic properties kind of fall behind, because the projectile can shear right through it.”

The development of this as-yet-unnamed composite began shortly after September 11, 2001, when Tex Tech, using a grant from the Maine Technology Institute, tried to gain a foothold in the newfound market for bulletproof cockpit doors. That didn’t go so well, as Erb explains.

“We really didn’t hit solidly on getting the cockpit door material in there, because it’s largely politics,” Erb says. “There’s lots of politics that are involved — big, big companies that are involved in trying to capture that market.”

Convinced that it still had a worthwhile product on its hands, Tex Tech applied for and received another grant from MTI, this time to explore other applications for its new ballistic composite. And this is where the company is currently at; investigating who might be interested in the product.

Erb envisions several takers: the military, law enforcement agencies, and aircraft manufacturers. He notes that Tex Tech has actually been in talks with the Department of Defense.

“It would be used as a new type of material for aircraft,” he says, “and also for armored vehicles, for tanks, for other applications — specifically military.

“It would also be used in AC-130 gunships; it would be used in all kinds of aircraft that require ballistic protection, especially helicopters,” he says, as well as for handheld shields that could be used by military troops and law-enforcement agents.

Erb also thinks the composite would be valuable for commercial airplanes.

“It could be used as a hidden panel someplace — say you’re in an airplane, behind the bulkhead — you want to protect this particular little black box so it doesn’t get shot. Or if something bursts it protects against fragments, so that critical components don’t become damaged.”

So where’s the big ideological question? These are all perfectly logical applications of a technology that should be lauded as a product of the military-industry complex that aims to protect, not to kill. And I laud. (And I try not to think about the fact that a better-protected military can do that much more killing.) But things get weird for me when Erb mentions, as he puts it, the “whole other dimension” in which this super-composite can be used, because it makes me realize how much our society has changed and will continue to change as we simultaneously fuel and fight this “war on terror.”

“It would be used for mitigating civil structures,” he says. “Like if there was a blast — if somebody put a bomb in a trash can — it would be used to make trash cans out of. It would be used to protect cement walls. It would be used to protect a barrier in front of an embassy; it could be used as the wall itself.”

Bulletproof trash cans. Bulletproof barricades. Bulletproof buildings. I guess I should be thankful for the protection, and in the very real sense that this technology could save lives, I am. Innocent people die every day, no matter what your politics are. Less death is a good thing. But I worry that our elected leaders and our CEOs, busy deciding who gets the cockpit-door contract, will forget that the pursuit of protection is not the same as the pursuit of peace.

Jess Kilby can be reached at jkilby@phx.com. “Technophilia” highlights the latest and greatest of the tech world and runs once a month.