Hybrid panels from woven Kevlar® and Dyneema® fabrics against ballistic impact with wearing flexibility

.This paper reports on a study of hybrid ballistic panels consisting of plain-woven fabrics made from Kevlar (R) and Dyneema (R), aiming to achieve protective and flexible ballistic panels. Experimental and numerical approaches were adopted for this research. Ballistic penetration tests indicated that the single-phase Kevlar (R) fabric panels was more energy absorbent than that of the Dyneema (R) fabric panels at low areal density. When the areal density reached around 1.4 kg/m2, the Kevlar (R) woven fabric panels started to outperform the Dyneema (R) counterpart in terms of energy absorption. Accordingly, hybrid panels from the two types of fabrics were engineered and such panels were associated to the higher specific energy absorption than the single-phase panels. It was also found that placing the Kevlar (R) fabric layer close to the impact face and the Dyneema (R) fabric layers towards the back face resulted in an improvement of around 16% in ballistic performance over the panels constructed in the reverse sequence. In this investigation, the optimum ratio of the two types of fabrics in hybrid panels was found to be 1:1.