London, Dec 8 (ANI): An eight million pound research centre in London formed to find better ways of protecting soldiers will design special combat boots with putty-filled soles that deflect roadside bombs blasts.
The Royal British Legion Centre for Blast Injury Studies, to be based at Imperial College, London, will design improved equipment including body armour and vehicles.
The centre will also work on better and faster diagnostic techniques that could save more lives and reduce long-term medical problems.
According to The Telegraph, one of the first tasks of the center would be to design the new combat boots, which will be insulated with putty to absorb and deflect the impact of a blast from an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), the biggest killer for service personnel in Afghanistan.
The centre will experiment with different materials to work out how best to transfer the blast energy away from the heel, which if damaged often leads to eventual amputation, and towards the shin bone, which can be more easily reconstructed.
A prototype boot is likely to be ready late next year, and the centre, which is expected to employ up to 30 people, will also try to improve other elements of body armour as well as vehicle design, the paper said.
Professor Anthony Bull, of the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial, who is Director of the new centre, said that they have started working on the boots.
"We have already started tests that show there is a significant difference in the protection that boots give if, for example, you double the thickness of the protection in the sole from 4mm to 8mm, which is still quite thin," the paper quoted Bull, as saying.
"Previously, servicemen and women who were wounded from blasts would have died from their injuries, and now military protection, medical science and practice has improved greatly so that there is a greater prospect of survival," he said.
"We now need to assess the effects of blasts on these survivors. We urgently need to know more, so that we can protect and treat people more effectively," he added. (ANI)
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