A team of University Engineering students led by Jeff O’Dell, a second-year biomedical and mechanical engineering student, is working to complete bulletproof armor that the U.S. Army could use.
The students — Dan Abebayehu, Ann Bailey, Jeff O’Dell, David Holland and Adam Rogers — took an introductory biomedical engineering class, BIOM 200, “Biomedical Design and Discovery,” taught by Biomedical Engineering Prof. William Walker during fall 2008.
“In my class, BIOM 200, students identify their own problems to address,” Walker said. “My job is to ask them a lot of questions and to force them to collect information from a lot of different sources and a lot of different people.”
Walker said in O’Dell’s case, his project was driven by his personal experience in combat.
“In Prof. Walker’s Design and Discovery class, we were assigned to discover 20 problem areas to design a project around,” O’Dell said. “The majority were military ones because of my service.”
O’Dell served as a fire-support specialist in Iraq from August 2005 until December 2006.
“Our top concern was body armor because it’s so heavy, cumbersome and inflexible for many soldiers,” O’Dell said. “We looked into whether the armor would be flexible enough for soldiers to move comfortably around in when they’re in combat.”
Another problem with conventional body armor is that it can only stop one round of armor-piercing bullets.
“We wanted to design body armor with the ability to stop multiple rounds,” Bailey said.
In order to accomplish the group’s goals, the project demanded different fields of expertise in the sciences.
“We had to draw on mechanical engineering, and the project involved a lot of material science,” O’Dell said. “We put it all together, and it gelled nicely.”
The students also drew on the expertise of Hadyn Wadley, professor of materials science and engineering.
“Wadley is an armor specialist and he helped put us on the right track of finding the right concept of armor to focus on,” O’Dell said.
The project is drawing significant interest from the U.S. Army as well as the private sector.
“Right now, we’re doing testing with a company that specializes in armor,” O’Dell said. “The Army is going to put it through testing next month.”
There is also a strong possibility that the armor testing could branch out into other applications.
“We were focused on developing body armor and we stumbled on something for vehicle armor,” O’Dell said.
Walker said O’Dell’s project is one of many in his class concentrating on designing project-oriented solutions for real-world problems rather than solely research-oriented initiatives.
“I had a team working on a new design for microscopic surgery tools, another working on a design of a new method of wound closure and another working on a low-cost water filtration system for developing countries,” Walker said. “The class is about developing real solutions to real problems.”
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