Our innovative padding designs significantly enhance impact protection and comfort.
Hard Head Veterans is proud to announce our new microlattice helmet pads for tactical and ballistic helmets. Developed in partnership with 3D printing leader Carbon®, these pads use advanced 3D printing to create a structure that absorbs and dissipates far more energy from impacts than traditional foam. The best part? The benefits go way beyond protection.
Why Our Microlattice Pads Are a Game Changer
In rigorous testing, our new pads delivered dramatic improvements:
- Up to a 66% decrease in Ballistic Transient Deformation (BTD), also known as Backface Deformation (BFD). BTD/BFD is the inward denting of the helmet after a round is stopped. Less BFD means a significantly lower risk of injury to the wearer's head from the impact.
- Up to a 21.7% decrease in Blunt Impact Acceleration. These pads slow the transfer of force to the head, reducing the severity of blunt force impacts.
- Superior Comfort and Airflow. The pads consist largely of air, creating a greater airflow that keeps helmets an average of 14° (F) cooler.
- Absorbent and Easy to Maintain. They wrap evenly around the user’s head, are positively buoyant, and absorb no sweat or water, making them quick-drying and easy to clean.
Hard Head Veterans developed these pads in partnership with the 3D printing company Carbon®, using their proprietary Carbon Digital Light Synthesis™ process. Carbon DLS™ is a breakthrough resin-based 3D printing process that uses digital light projection, oxygen-permeable optics, and engineering-grade materials to produce polymeric parts with exceptional mechanical properties.
3D printing has revolutionized manufacturing. With costs falling and precision rising, these new techniques have paved the way for materials that are exceptionally lightweight, excellent at absorbing impacts, and less wasteful to produce.
The Science of Protection: What is a Microlattice?
The core of this breakthrough is the microlattice—an engineering marvel made possible by advanced manufacturing.
Think of a microlattice as architecture on a tiny, molecular scale. Overwhelmingly, it's made of air, sometimes as little as 0.01% solid material, in the form of an interconnected network of microscopic struts (or tubes). These are arranged in a carefully designed geometry, often inspired by natural crystal structures, to achieve extreme strength and impact absorption at an incredibly low weight.
Like a well-engineered bridge that uses trusses to spread stress, the microlattice structure redirects and absorbs impact energy better than a solid or simple foam.
These materials tend to be very, very light. Their struts may consist of metals, elastic polymers, or other substances. In fact, a microlattice recently developed by the aerospace firm Boeing now holds the record for the lightest structural material ever made.
Hard Head Veterans’ microlattice pads are made of polymers to make them as light as possible. The diverse geometries of the pads make them ideal for use in:
- Energy dissipation
- Heat absorption
- Vibration and impact absorption
- Wings, fan blades, and other applications where high strength-to-weight ratios are required
- Biomedical implants
Some lattices are complex and disordered, while others consist of simpler, uniform shapes. Image source: Applied Sciences (CC BY 4.0)
How We Built the Future of Helmet Padding
To bring microlattice technology from concept to your helmet, we partnered with Carbon®, using their proprietary Carbon Digital Light Synthesis™ (Carbon DLS™) process.
The Power of Additive Manufacturing
Traditional "subtractive" manufacturing carves shapes out of a block of material, which is wasteful and not precise enough for the micro-scale designs of a lattice.
This milling machine carves shapes from a metal block, exemplifying the limits of subtractive manufacturing technology: waste, microscopic imprecision, and restrictive design possibilities. Image source: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Carbon DLS™ is a revolutionary additive manufacturing (3D printing) technique. Instead of slow, stepwise printing that often results in low-resolution or problematic parts, Carbon DLS™ uses a process called Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP).
CLIP is a non-stop, resin-based 3D printing method that:
-
Projects an image of UV light through a window onto a liquid resin, curing a cross-section of the part.
-
The printed part is continuously and seamlessly drawn out of the resin bath—a crucial step.
-
A "dead zone" (a mixture of resin and oxygen) forms a micro-thin membrane that prevents the part from sticking to the machine. This eliminates slow, damaging peeling processes.
This breakthrough approach allows for the precise, consistent, and cost-effective production of microlattices at a speed of hundreds of millimeters per hour, making it commercially viable for high-performance helmet padding.
Traditional 3D printing is a slow, stepwise process. Light exposure, adding new resin, and repositioning must each happen separately and be repeated thousands of times for each component produced. But with DLS, these processes happen seamlessly. And by embracing an approach that isn't so start-and-stop, it's possible to precisely build hundreds of millimeters of material each hour rather than only a few.
Moving Beyond Foam
Reduced impact and discomfort give microlattice helmet padding the edge as a new ballistic helmet technology. During a collision, helmets protect users in at least two primary ways: preventing penetration of the scalp and skull, and distributing the force of blunt impacts to make other injury types less severe.
To accomplish the second objective, most helmets are lined with impact-absorbing pads. And for years, foam has been the standard choice—it’s inexpensive and relatively effective. The offerings have even evolved dramatically over the years: combinations of materials, such as those seen in our own military helmets, effectively resist impacts.
But some foam pads can be too stiff, which can worsen impacts, and they don't hold up well to multiple impacts. And on the battlefield, shockwaves from improvised explosive devices can still cause lasting injuries even through state-of-the-art headgear.
Microlattices have the potential to be as much as ten times more effective than foams at absorbing energy. The elastic polymer microlattices in our new pads offer:
-
Better performance in temperature extremes.
-
Durability through multiple impacts.
-
Superior comfort because they are light and allow for exceptional airflow.
Test Results: Proof of Performance
Hard Head Veterans’ first generation of microlattice pads underwent a series of tests at National technical Systems labs to assess their performance:
- Blunt impact tests following AR/PD 10-02 Rev A Advanced Combat Helmet requirements established by The Director, Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E) at the Department of Defense (DOD).
- Backface deformation tests following the National Institute of Justice’s NIJ 0106.01 standard.
The results?
- The helmets with microlattice pads passed 14 blunt impact tests — 2 hits each at the front, back, left side, right side, left nape, and right nape of the helmet. More importantly, the measured peak acceleration of the impacts on a helmet with microlattice pads averaged only 8 G vs. 63.5 G for standard pads. That’s a 21.7% improvement.
- To test backface deformation, a helmet with microlattice pads was placed on top of a dummy clay-form head and shot with 9mm rounds at the crown, right side, left side, front, and back of the helmet. The average “backface signature” (how far the helmet deformed into the clayform) was only 4.41 mm, a 66.7% improvement over the 13.2 mm average of a helmet using standard pads.
These elastic microlattices are a big improvement in ballistic helmet technology, and they also show great promise for headgear used in sports, motorcycling, and other applications.
A report recently produced under a Department of Defense contract recommends exploring microlattice use in advanced combat helmets (ACHs). The researchers’ preliminary tests confirmed that the material outperforms state-of-the-art foams currently found in ACHs, reducing collision forces transmitted to the wearer by as much as 20%—similar to the performance of Hard Head Veterans’ new microlattice pads.
Microlattice head padding offers better results than leading foam alternatives. Image source: US Army
Stay Safe and Cool
The benefits of microlattice padding aren't limited to impact reduction. It also performs better in temperature extremes and provides greater airflow and comfort—a big plus for anyone who has worn a helmet for an extended period.
Pads that are too hot or too hard have been reported as problems with prior ACH designs and may contribute to headgear being worn less often than it should be. But because microlattices consist largely of air, they can be designed with comfort in mind, resulting in head protection that is far easier to wear. Hard Head Veterans’ microlattice pads are light, conform to the wearer’s head, and enable airflow that keeps helmets an average of 14° (F) cooler.
Microlattice pad technology and emerging technology are paving the way for leaps in head injury prevention.
The microlattice pads developed by Hard Head Veterans and Carbon are a tremendous innovation that can reduce head injuries and keep wearers cooler and more comfortable. But the future of this technology is even more exciting.
Some researchers believe that the architectural freedom offered by microlattice pad technology may one day provide a way to definitively address other issues in brain injury prevention—notably, the tricky problem of concussions.
Hard Head Veterans is already working on more improvements to our first generation of microlattice helmet pads. And we expect to see even better results soon as we further adapt the design and implement material advances with Carbon!
To get the best pads for head protection on the market, shop HHV’s selection of microlattice pads now! Looking to stay up to date on these and other developments in new military helmet technology? Read more from the Hard Head Veterans blog, where we explore the science of brain injury, helmet padding and shell design, and other things related to ballistic and tactical helmets.