SuperlightweightNanoengineeredAluminum forStrength under Impact

. An ideal armor material is expected to have three attri-butes: sufficient strength at high impact velocities, sufficienttoughness to carry normal structural loads, and low weight.The degree to which each attribute is desirable depends bothon what is being protected (a vehicle or an individual) and onthe specific threat (e.g. an anti-vehicle weapon or a bullet).Materials that have all three attributes have been extraordina-rily difficult to find, and much current vehicular armor usescombinations of multiple materials, one of which carries thebulk of the structural load and another, which has the appro-priate impact response. Constructing such “armor packages”with sufficiently low weight often defines the limits of vehi-cular weight, leading directly to limits on the ability to rapid-ly project military power and constraints on geopoliticaloperations during global conflicts.Materials used for armor have evolved from naturalsources such as wood and leather to synthetics that include fi-bers, monolithics and hybrid composites of metals, ceramicsand polymers. Recent advances in armor materials includearamid fibers for ballistic vests and boron carbide for smallarms protective inserts (SAPI) plates. In a monolithic armordesign, the material is modified to attain a balanced range ofproperties to prevent penetration and fragmentation. This is atypical compromise between hardness and ductility in mostmaterials. In modern armor designs, discrete layers of materi-als are functionally optimized to sequentially shatter/erodethe projectile followed by containing all residual debris. Thisstrategy maximizes the gains from each contributing compo-nent. However, the performance of such an armor system isbounded by the weighted average of the macro-componentsin the armor recipe. In this paper, a selectively dispersednano/micro component material (TriMod) is demonstratedto exhibit extraordinary dynamic flow strength that farexceeds any of the respective individual constituents. Thiswatershed innovation has created a new path to design nativearmor materials with properties exceeding that of layeredarmor designs, without compromises.Aluminum (Al) alloys are the most widely used metals intechnologies where weight reduction is a major design con-sideration, and specific approaches such as solid solutionstrengthening and age-hardening