One of the ways CHOBHAM armor protects a tank are ceramic plates. When the armour is hit by a HEAT round the ceramic layer shatters under the impact point, forming a dust under high pressure. When the HEAT round “burns through” the outer layers of armour and reaches the ceramic, the dust comes flying back out the hole, slowing the jet of metal.
I think it might work if something like that was tried with the plates inserted in body armor. Just use two plates and sandwhich some rubber between them. Bullet hits the first plate and enters the rubber heating it up and making it boil. Then the boiling rubber pushes the bullet out of the hole that it came through. Could it work? Has anyone tried?
I’d bet that the bullet will go right through the rubber. It might burn or melt the rubber, but the bullet has a great deal of kinetic energy. Rubber can be easily deformed, unlike steel. How is it going to capture enough of the bullet’s energy to do the work required to slow down or stop the bullet?
Ceramic trauma plates are already in use in body armor, along with lexan and metal ones.
Well perhaps rubber isn’t the best filler material. But everytime i just think of how awesome it would be to have the bullets pushed away from the target using their own energy I can’t help but wish it was possible. Maybe the space between the plates can be filled with compressed air or a liquid under pressure or something?
Has anyone done any actual research in this directory? Are there any ideas for a non-passive body armor that doesnt’ just sit there and wait to get penetrated(the flamethrowing nail launching giant robot from Canada does not count)? Wiki has nothing so one wonders…
Reactive armor, on the personal scale, is also going to run into some basic physics problems. While I am sure that the trauma of being shot is severe, the trauma of being that close to reactive armor, and the consequent kinetic blow to your torso, will not be insignificant. Knock you on your ass, it will! Break bones, it might. Soft tissue damage galore.
From the new book Yoda on Reactive Armor Concepts.
What you are envisioning isn’t going to work the way you seem to think. The reason Chobham and other composite armors are popular is that they are well-suited to stopping a particular type of round. The HEAT round depends on the Munroe effect – the concentration of explosive force by a concavity in the explosive itself. In the regular rifle or pistol round, there is no explosive and no Munroe effect.
Your idea is to take the energy delivered by the round, and reverse it. To do that, you have to push against the person wearing the armor.
I am not talking about reactive armor. CHOBHAM is not reactive, it has no reactive components. Thats why you’ll see soldiers riding on top of an M1 but never a T72 -the top of the T72 is covered with explosive reactive bricks.
There remains the problem of the plate absorbing the full energy of the bullet and hitting the wearer with that force(and even a little more if it manages to push the bullet out all the way). I think if the plates could be interlocked with each other(while the armor is battle ready, they don’t always have to be like that) and that way the whole suit will absorb the damage instead of one plate. It looks like this is going to remain the stuff of sci-fi for the next couple of years considering there has so far not been a single link posted in the thread. Oh well not like I get shot at very often anyway 
From your Wiki link:
and
So, there we have it; Chobham is good against HEAT but not standard penetration. The reason it’s good against HEAT rounds is the expelled dust breaks up the blowtorch-like jet that burns through the armor and showers the occupants with white-hot metal. Normal bullets have no such effect to defeat.
Interestingly, if a round is spinning this will also disrupt the HEAT blowtorch-effect; thus (last I read) modern US tanks have smoothbore cannon. Russian tanks, on the other hand, had rifled cannon but the HEAT rounds had a sleeve that would spin, while the actual explosive would remain mostly rotationless.
The main armor-piercing round used by the M1A1 is a fin-stabilized discarding sabot KE penetrator made of depleted uranium. Much more effective than the old HEAT round (which they do still carry). The smooth bore allows higher muzzle velocities for better penetration, and the fins on the projectile eliminate the need for rifling.
They also have a new canister round for antipersonnel use. :eek:
Ouch. That’s gotta hurt! 