Tomorrow's Body Armor Could Fight Germs

[bhdean]

Kevlar is great stuff. It's strong, lightweight and fire resistant, making it an ideal material for suits worn by firefighters, police and other emergency workers. It is used in everything from tires to body armor.
Now researchers plan to add germ-fighting to the list of Kevlar's virtues.

At University of South Dakota, Yuyu Sun and Jie Luo have developed a new method to coat Kevlar with a substance called acyclic N-Halamine. They tested it against E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Candida tropicalis (a fungus), MS2 virus, and Bacillus subtilis spores (to mimic anthrax).

After a short time, large amounts of microorganisms stuck to untreated fabric samples, but the coated fabrics showed little to no adherence of the infectious agents. The coating is long-lasting and can be reactivated if needed, the scientist will report in the Aug. 6 issue of the American Chemical Society's journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

"The resultant fabric materials provided potent, durable, and rechargeable biocidal activities," the researchers write. "The excellent thermal and mechanical properties of the original Kevlar fabrics were successfully retained after the coating treatment."

The PMAA-based coating, as it's called, is said to have antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, and antispore functions.

"Although more studies are needed to further evaluate the effectiveness of the coated Kevlar fabrics," the researchers write, "these findings point to the great potential of the PMAA-based coating approach for a broad range of real applications.

[Anth]

It would be very easy to do things like that with Kevlar as its effectively high-tech cotton in that it is woven from spools to make whatever you need. Huddersfield (where I studied) used to be full of textile mills and now some of them are being resurrected to weave Kevlar. I studied Kevlar in a fair bit of depth and I doubt the knowledge will leave me any time soon!

[bhdean]

I'm glad that you have some first-hand knowledge of weaving and kevlar and can share that knowledge with the rest of us. If more people were like you, there would be more people like you. Thanks.

[Anth]

I don't have first hand knowledge, but I studied high performance materials as part of a motorsport technology degree. Kevlar is used a lot in motorsports (the cords that keep the wheels tied to a formula 1 car are kevlar) so I learnt a fair bit about it from the lecturer (a professor of materials technology).

Saying that, we did have a spool of aramid fibre (unwoven kevlar) in a lecture and it got thrown around the room with people pulling on it from all directions to see how strong it actually is