A T-Shirt That Can Save Your Life

Trends N Style

oi-Staff

By Super Admin

Friday, May 20, 2011, 11:48

2011-05-20

An ordinary cotton T-shirt can now be converted into a body armour, thanks to scientists from South Carolina, Switzerland and China. They combined the carbon in the cotton with boron to create a tough, light-weight fabric of boron carbide, the same material used to protect war tanks.

Available at Wal-Mart, the treated T-shirt would be not only bulletproof, but also resistant to ultraviolet rays from the sun and life-threatening neutrons emitted by decaying radioactive materials.

The researchers are now working to make more comfortable body armour for soldiers and police.

"The current boron carbide armour is strong, but its not flexible and its very heavy. We tried to solve this problem but with a different approach. In our approach, we used cotton T-shirts," said Xiaodong Li, a scientist at the University of South Carolina.

The idea behind was to combine dissolved boron with the carbon fibres inside the fabric to form boron carbide. To get this, the cotton strips were dipped into a black solution of boron. After an hour, the strips were removed from the solution and baked in at oven at more than 1,000 degrees Celsius (1832 degrees Fahrenheit) for an hour.

The heat stripped away anything that wasn't carbon or boron, and combined these two elements into boron carbide.

The resulting fabric is very different than the original material. It is stronger, tougher and stiffer than the original cotton, but it can still be bent, unlike normal boron carbide armour plates.