By Matthew Cox

Sgt. Jeffrey O’Dell knows a lot about body armor. The 29-year-old National Guard soldier learned just how heavy his interceptor vest and protective plates felt to carry during his first tour to Iraq with the 172nd Stryker Brigade in 2005.

For the past six months, O’Dell has literally become a student of body armor at the University of Virginia, where he is leading an undergraduate project to design a new armor plate that’s lighter than the plates soldiers carry into combat.

A design test in March showed how difficult it will be to succeed.

Today, soldiers wear Enhanced Soldier Protective Inserts in their Improved Outer Tactical Vest. Each ESAPI weighs about 5.5 pounds.

The complete IOTV system — when equipped with one ESAPI in the front and one in the rear, two Enhanced Side Ballistic Inserts, soft ballistic armor inserts and the Deltoid Axillary Protector attachments that offer additional protection for the shoulder and sides — weighs about 30 pounds.

“I have deployed and I know how heavy our equipment is and how hard it is to do our jobs,” said the second-year UVA student, who majors in biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering.

It was no small endeavor O’Dell and three other students embarked upon last fall when they launched the biomedical engineering class project. Creating armor plates with the right blend of protection and weight has been a key focus of the Pentagon and several major defense companies since the wars began more than seven years ago.

O’Dell and his classmates enjoyed some early success Nov. 20 when their first prototype plate stopped the first eight of 10 rounds of M2 .30-caliber armor-piercing ammunition at a test at H.P. White Laboratory Inc. in Maryland, a facility the Army has often used in the past to test its body armor.

But compared with the Army’s ESAPI, the UVA prototype, made from a ceramic known as alumina, was “about 2 pounds too heavy, O’Dell said.

Still, it was an impressive showing and Army test officials noticed.

“They have given us a lot of advice,” O’Dell said.

A $5,000 grant from UVA paid for the prototype plates, he said.

In a second test, on March 4, O’Dell’s team tested three prototypes between .5 and 1.5 pounds lighter than ESAPI.

The silicone carbide they used in the prototypes “didn’t quite have the effect we anticipated; all three of those failed on the first round,” O’Dell said. “We have got to find that range of strength-to-weight ratio.”

O’Dell says he’s not giving up, but his role in the effort is on hold for now since he is preparing for another deployment to Iraq later this year with the Tennessee National Guard’s 278th Armor Battalion.

“I’ll come back whenever we get back and start it over again.”