It probably won’t have Tony Stark’s jetpack or his Google Glass-like processer, but engineers at the U.S. Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) are occupied on an Iron Man-like set of body armor for Special Ops fighters.
The body armor, called the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit or TALOS, is scheduled for a demonstration with the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) on Nov. 19 at the MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, according to a report by the Defense Media System.
SOCOM Chief William McRaven said that TALOS is one of his big significances. “I’d like that last operator that we lost to be the last operator we lose in this fight or the fight of the future,” he said at a news conference in July. “I think we can get there.”
Jim Tinsley, a partner at the defense consulting firm Avascent, said that not all sorts of body armor are created equal. The Marine Corps started adding more body armor to soldiers, but SOCOM is unwilling to do that since it’ll decrease mobility. What TALOS aims to do is to get around physics and make lighter body armor, but also make it sturdier.
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It seems counterintuitive that manufacturing body armor lighter could offer a soldier more fortification. RDECOM is planning to use magnetorheological (MR) fluids in TALOS to resolve this paradox. “MR fluid armor relies on magnetic fields that can be mixed to create different degrees of hardness and elasticity,” said Tinsley.
But the choice of MR fluids in TALOS comes as a bit of a astonishment to Tinsley. “The agreement has been that shear-thickening fluid, which reacts to a force or impact by hardening, is more practical than MR and further likely to be commercialized sooner,” he said. Maybe there’s been a breakthrough in MR that hasn’t been publicized yet.
| In addition to TALOS’ defensive capability is its aptitude to combine numerous types of technologies, such as physiological sensors and power supplies, into a single piece of gadget. “Each of these technologies were developed in parallel,” said Tinsley. “Now, RDECOM is looking to SOCOM as an early adopter and seeing how to integrate all these technologies.” |
November’s demo of the body armor also assists as a way for SOCOM to assess what it truly wants in TALOS.
Reference Link: http://www.everythinglubbock.com/story/iron-man-like-body-armor-for-soldiers-in-the-works/d/story/yNv14gLV9U6hvVwjy-1N6w
Images was from: livescience.com
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