Effects of shear thickening fluids to enhance the impact resistance of soft body armor composites: a review

Abstract Soft body armor composites are broadly utilized for individual security due to their light weight and flexible nature. However, they are not viable in halting high-velocity impact, particularly against impact at a near distance. Integrating shear thickening fluids (STFs) into these composites is a promising result of upgrading their impact resistance. This review article highlights the progress in improving the impact resistance of soft body armor composites due to the incorporation of STFs. It discusses the parameters affecting energy absorption, shear thickening fluid properties, rheological properties of STFs, mechanisms of energy dissipation during the impact, fabrication techniques of STF-fabric composites, ballistic test techniques, and challenges of ballistic performance evaluation and wearer consolation. This review paper incorporates previous research work for experimental and numerical simulation results. In general, the integration of STFs into soft body armor composites showed noteworthy guarantees in the impact resistance capabilities of soft body armor composites. The most frequent applications of soft body armor composites are security personnel, civilian applications, emergency response teams, private security, body guards, law enforcement, and the military.