Police officers have unquestionably one of hardest jobs to do day in and day out. There really is no typical day in the office. Every day brings a different situation which makes the job so much more difficult. A routine traffic stop can turn into a shootout and an officer must be prepared to react in a split second. Sometimes, that might be the difference between life and death. Officers that work in prisons have challenging jobs. Prisoners are known to find and assemble dangerous contraptions that can pose as a threat toward prison officers. Therefore, officers require a need to be protected when situations like this occur. A groundbreaking discovery has been made to protect officers and the general population. The invention of a knife-proof vest that makes use of a shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluid leaves authorities assured that they are protected under many circumstances. .
A knife stab can be very deadly. Approximately 1,500 people die each year from knives in the United States and that's five times more deaths than rifles accounted for in 2013 (Davis). Traditional body armor is exclusive to protect against one form of weaponry, usually ballistic or knife and stab wounds. Therefore, most attention put forth toward the design and engineering of knew forms of protection focus on solving just one half of the puzzle. It is proposed that there may be a solution to provide protection from both stab and ballistic wounds. A regular t-shirt is made from cotton. A knife can penetrate this material very easily which then leaves no barrier between that and your body. To help solve this problem involving deaths with knives, a shear thickening fluid has been created that can protect against knives and even ballistics to an extent.
A shear thickening fluid has two components. It's a mixture of both a liquid and solid combined. The liquid component is polyethylene glycol (Wilson). Polyethylene glycol is a polymer commonly used in lubricates (Wilson).