Novel Flame and Impact Resistant Foam Core

Our country is now faced with new challenging terrorist threats to our civil infrastructure and transportation segments. Meeting these challenges will require high performance material developments on a grand scale, which have the capability of meeting minimum ballistic requirements from handgun threats and the containment of high velocity fragments from the use of explosive devices. In Phase I a prototype foam core panel was panel was produced which met ballistic, fire and weight constraints as required in the original solicitation. The objective of the proposed research is to further refine the Impact Resistant Foam Core materials for higher threat levels and to develop larger production scale methodologies for commercial production. Numerous methods will be explored which include in-situ placement of the foam cores through the pultrusion process to create singular monolithic foam cored panels as well as the development of off-line forming, foaming and laminating techniques.