Design and material selection guidelines and strategies for transparent armor systems

As evidenced by the recent experience of the US Armed Forces involved in the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, armoring military-vehicle windshields and side windows is a very challenging task. Apart from providing the required single-hit and multi-hit ballistic protection to the vehicle occupants, the armor must also possess and retain optical transparency and be compatible with on-board imaging and communications equipment. In addition, standard low cost and light-weight requirements are also critical in the design and engineering of transparent armor systems. At the present time, the design and fabrication of transparent armor systems is done almost exclusively using empirical, trial-and-error and legacy approaches. Consequently, new transparent armor system development lead times are long, the costs are quite high and many shortcomings of the systems become apparent only after they have been fielded. To help better understand and overcome this situation, a brief overview and discussion of the basic transparent armor architectures, functional layers and transparent materials is provided and a set of design and material selection guidelines is proposed.