Problems of medical and biological support of the process of developing advanced bulletproof vests

Currently, as part of combat equipment, body armor is the main tool designed for individual protection of a person’s torso from bullets, shrapnel and steel arms. Since March 1, 2019, GOST 34286-2017 has been introduced as a national standard of the Russian Federation, in which one of the assessed indicators of the resistance of armored clothing to the effects of means of destruction is the indicator of the reserve effect of the striking element when the protective structure is not penetrated, which should not exceed the value taken as the maximum permissible in the prescribed manner. In this case, the pre-armor effect of a striking element in case of non-penetration of the protective structure is assessed only after the completion of the development of a sample of armored clothing by the corresponding accredited organization. The existing methods for determining the permissibility of the reserve impact indicator when the protective structure is not penetrated can in principle be divided into medical, biological and technical, and technical. In the Russian Federation, the method using large laboratory animals, pigs weighing 80–90 kg, is mainly used to determine the level of the reserve impact in terms of the severity of the reserve contusion injury. While in NATO countries, human corpses, individual tissues and organs, as well as parts of carcasses of large animals are used to determine the same parameter. However, at present, both in our country and abroad, there is no single methodological approach to assessing the impact of armor when testing protective products. As a result of targeted research, it is necessary to scientifically substantiate the principles of modeling this effect when the body armor is not penetrated with the subsequent processing of standard methods of state testing of body armor. The tests must be based on a method that allows obtaining parameters expressed in digital values and correlated with the results of experiments on biological objects. It is this “numerical” parameter that should be taken as a criterion for assessing the permissibility of the level of shock impact when testing promising personal body armor (bibliography: 21 refs).