Stumbled over this article about EOD suits as featured in the film "Hurt Locker" ("Tierra Hostil" here in Spain). I had ays wondered how effective they were, this article answers a lot of questions about them and how they work:
Say you're a professional bomb defuser, like the soldiers in the Oscar-nominated film The Hurt Locker — and the bomb you're working on suddenly goes off. Do you just kiss your adrenaline-addicted ass goodbye? No — odds are you're wearing an EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) suit, which means you actually have a fighting chance of walking away alive.
I had to know how these blast-resistant suits worked in real life — so I called up Pravit Borkar, a ballistics engineer at HighCom Security, a firm that manufactures EOD suits for military applications, and asked him to explain.
Definitely worthwile a read:
The "EOD ensemble," as Borkar calls it, is not simply a body-condom version of a Kevlar vest: "It's a complex composite product consisting of both rigid and soft armor systems." These two fundamental layers are designed to defeat the two main threats in an explosion: the overpressure pulse, or shockwave; and the fragmentation, commonly known as shrapnel.
The overpressure wave is actually the more dangerous of the two. A microsecond after a bomb goes off, the explosion compresses the surrounding air and blows it outward in a lightning-fast shockwave that ripples through clothing and literally flattens internal organs.
http://dvice.com/archives/2010/03/hurt-locker-sui.phpRattler
