Kent’s School of Natural Sciences has recently opened a new experimental ballistics facility for teaching and research, adding to its unique portfolio of specialist forensics facilities.
Ballistics, the science of the propulsion, flight, and impact of projectiles, has a range of applications including: informing crime scene investigations, improving wound care and helping to design safer buildings.
Ballistics, the science of the propulsion, flight, and impact of projectiles, has a range of important real-world applications. Forensic science students and researchers will use the new facility on our Canterbury campus to help improve understanding of many ballistics-related processes. This could include how bullets ricochet off surfaces or wound the human body in different ways to support crime scene investigations, through to supporting the design of safer building structures or the development or more effective medical processes and devices for wound care management, saving more lives. The facility will enhance undergraduate and postgraduate students’ skills regarding how shooting scenes are investigated and how important ballistic research is undertaken.
Built to the highest modern safety standards, the walls in the ballistics facility are lined with anti-ricochet panels and with a bank of rubber material at the target end to ‘trap’ and contain any fired bullets. Using highly specialist equipment, many ammunition types can be fired using a specially designed experimental gun system, all firearms can be remotely fired towards the target to ensure maximum safety and accuracy, and sensitive detectors are used to measure each bullet’s velocity. There is also a state-of-the-art ventilation system built in to take any chemical residues produced by the guns away from the users of the facility so they are not inhaled.
Students and researchers will also be able to analyse bullets from crime scenes (and relate them back to particular firearms) using Kent’s cutting-edge comparison microscope.
On the new facility, Dr Chris Shepherd, a Reader in Forensic Science and the lead academic of the undergraduate and postgraduate Ballistics modules at the University said: ‘This is an incredible opportunity for our students to experience and appreciate first-hand the effects of firearms in a safe and supportive environment, and is just one of many of the distinctive training experiences that our students will access throughout their studies at Kent.’
External organisations with a range of ballistic testing needs will also be able to hire the facility.
Any enquiries regarding the facility can be directed to Dr Chris Shepherd.
