Synchronous enhancement of safety protection and impact perception in intelligent leather

High protection performance and intelligence are gradually becoming indispensable key factors with the ever-improving personal protective equipment. However, protective material that can not only resist but also percept full type of impacts is an urgent need due to complex combat scenarios. This work reports an intelligent leather/shear stiffening gel (SSG)/Kevlar-shear thickening fluid (STF)/non-woven fabric (LSKSN) composite, which exhibits superior and comprehensive impact resistance performance in needle puncture, knife puncture, ballistic impact, and blunt impact. Especially, the LSKSN composite not only improves the puncture resistance performance by 71% but also still maintains a large resistance after being punctured. Moreover, the LSKSN composite possesses a high limit penetrated velocity of 159 m s−1 and can dissipate a high impact energy of 24.6 J, causing the bulletproof to be improved by 22%. Due to the excellent force-buffering performance and rate-dependent energy dissipation characteristics in wide-impact energy, the maximum energy dissipation rate of the LSKSN composite reaches 95%. Simultaneously, the further developed electronic LSKSN (E-LSKSN) composite shows outstanding perceptual capability, which is sensitive to various impacts and can accurately identify the impact types through different resistance changes (10–8000%) and response times (0.1–100 ms). Finally, based on the bending sensing and impact sensing properties of the E-LSKSN composite, a wireless signal transmission system is constructed to monitor the safety and movement status of the human body in real-time, which demonstrates this LSKSN composite possesses high potential in the next generation of intelligent protective equipment.