Can science explain Black Panther’s suit?

The Black panther suit from the Marvel movies and comics, in addition to being made of vibranium, is also capable of absorbing and redirecting kinetic energy.

I have already talked at length here and here about how a material with vibranium-like properties could work in a scientifically plausible way.

But the suit’s ability to absorb and reuse kinetic energy as if it were a giant capacitor is something that deserves further investigation.

When an object, let’s say a projectile, hits the suit, the kinetic energy should somehow be stored inside it, in the form of a potential energy of some kind, so that the impact is an almost perfectly inelastic collision.

The most likely storing mechanism that the suit could use would probably be elastic potential energy.

What springs do is precisely to transform the kinetic energy imparted on them into a deformation that acts for all intents and purposes as a store of energy ready to be reused.

Springs are also the most straightforward method because they accomplish this task by virtue of their shape only, and they are, structurally speaking, very simple.

To function according to this principle, the suit should be fabricated to accommodate billions of very small springs at the molecular…