Engineered Materials

Ideal Jacobs, a small business established in 1921, has a long history of working with plastic films and molded product. Based on our molding technologies and unique chemistries used in demanding commercial applications, the TPCs make use of many of the same high-quality, impact modified and low burn, smoke and toxicity engineering polymers to create heavily reinforced thermoplastic composites intended for defense products. Trelleborg Offshore Boston has been a leader in the field of syntactic foams for over 40 years offering creative solutions with inherently energy absorbing products. Their lightweight syntactic foams exhibit extremely controllable properties including density, modulus, crush strength and strain-to-failure and are designed to meet very demanding specifications.

Advances In Materials / Processes

Hybrid composites developed by our team and partner Trelleborg Offshore Boston combine the heavily reinforced thermoplastic composites with syntactic foams to provide an armor system to protect against multiple threats. The TPC provide ballistic protection and with the addition of energy absorbing materials (EAMs) in syntactic foams, the same composite absorbs and dissipates blast energy as well. The high ductility composite and millions of micro and macro spheres contained in the syntactic foam absorb high pressures rather than just transmit and reflect the various blast effects. The hybrid system can deliver multiple and specified levels of protection, in varying shapes and sizes, with much easier construction than the existing alternatives such as welded steels (rolled homogeneous armor/RHA) or ceramics and associated support structures.

TPC Hybrid Armor Unique Features

• One panel for asymmetric / multiple threats such as fragments, bullets and acoustic/pressure wave.
• Operational improvements such no need for plating, paint, welding or maintenance due to weather exposur.
• Manufacturing flexibility provides a wide variety of thicknesses, sizes, colors and molded shape.
• Lower total cost of ownership (less maintainance) than thermoset epoxy fiberglass, steels and ceramic
• Hybrid armor can be worked in the field (cut, drilled, fastened) with hand and power tools familiar to craft.
• Glass fibers and reinforcements that do not burn, outgas or smoke and are not effected by weather.
• Unlike thermosets, engineering polymers used in TPCs are not irritants and emit very low toxins and smoke if burnt.
• TPCs have high emissivity, very little solar heat gain and have the added benefit of being non conductive.
• Flexible forming techniques enable over-molding of dissimilar materials, even embedding circuits or sensors.