How 'The Hurt Locker' Bomb suit works
Source: NPR
March 10, 2010
By Frank James
The critical and Academy Awards success of "The Hurt Locker" has brought much deserved attention to the important role played by explosive ordinance disposal or EOD teams in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts defined by the enemy's use of improvised explosive devices or IEDs.
It's also made many people curious about the technology these teams use to neutralize explosive devices, especially the EOD suit which looks something like an astronaut suit.
One of the best explainers I've seen about just how explosive devices kill and how the suit protects its wearer is on dvice.com.
A snip from John Pavlus' post:
The critical and Academy Awards success of "The Hurt Locker" has brought much deserved attention to the important role played by explosive ordinance disposal or EOD teams in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts defined by the enemy's use of improvised explosive devices or IEDs.
It's also made many people curious about the technology these teams use to neutralize explosive devices, especially the EOD suit which looks something like an astronaut suit.
One of the best explainers I've seen about just how explosive devices kill and how the suit protects its wearer is on dvice.com.
A snip from John Pavlus' post:
I had to know how these blast-resistant suits worked in real life -- so I called up Pravit Borkar, a ballistics engineer at HighCom Security, a firm that manufactures EOD suits for military applications, and asked him to explain.
How a Bomb Kills You
The "EOD ensemble," as Borkar calls it, is not simply a body-condom version of a Kevlar vest: "It's a complex composite product consisting of both rigid and soft armor systems." These two fundamental layers are designed to defeat the two main threats in an explosion: the overpressure pulse, or shockwave; and the fragmentation, commonly known as shrapnel.
The overpressure wave is actually the more dangerous of the two. A microsecond after a bomb goes off, the explosion compresses the surrounding air and blows it outward in a lightning-fast shockwave that ripples through clothing and literally flattens internal organs. Guy Pearce's character experiences it firsthand at the end of The Hurt Locker's tense opening sequence:
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