Ballistic test results for several different soft body armor systems

The performance standard for ballistic-resistant body armor published by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), NIJ Standard 0101.06, recommends estimating the perforation performance of body armor by performing a statistical analysis on V50 ballistic limit testing data. The first objective of this study is to evaluate and compare the estimations of the performance provided by different statistical methods applied to ballistic data generated in the laboratory. Three different distribution models are able to describe the relationship between the projectile velocity and the probability of perforation are considered: the logistic, the probit and the complementary log-log response models. A secondary objective of this study is to apply the different methods to a new body armor model with unusual ballistic limit results, leading one to suspect that it may not be best described by a symmetric model, to determine if this data can be better fitted by a model other than the logistic model. This work has been published as NISTIR 7760, "Analysis of Three Different Regression Models to Estimate the Ballistic Performance of New and Environmentally Conditioned Body Armor." The raw data (ballistic limit data) associated with this prior publication is archived in this dataset.