WATCH: This Armour Disintegrates Bullets

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Since bullets appeared on the scene a few hundred years ago, nothing has been the same. If once some chainmail or plate armour was enough to protect you from those pesky arrows, bullets changes everything. They’re the great equaliser. It doesn’t matter if it’s a trained warrior or a small child firing, once a bullet is headed your way, you should be worried.

Traditional bulletproof vests offer some protection, but until now, bullet was king. Researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) have developed a super strong metal foam armour material that quite literally turns bullets to dust.

The armour plating is made from composite metal foams (CMF), which are light, strong, and resilient far more than the Kevlar of metal plating used today. Afsaneh Rabiei, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NCSU has been working on CMFs for the last several years, developing and investigating them, and clearly his work has now come to fruition.

In the video below you can see a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor-piercing projectile, the standard bullet used for testing armour by the US Department of Justice guidelines.

The armour you see is only some 2.5cm thick. It’s composed of a Kevlar backing, a ceramic strike-face, and CMFs in the energy absorbing layer in the middle.

“We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch [2.54cm], while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters,” Rabiei wrote explaining the video.

We have to say, this is bad news for bullets.