Ballistic Impact Damage Of 3-D Orthogonal Woven Composite: Experimental Investigation & FEM Study

Ballistic damage is an important topic in impact protection engineering.High performance fibers,which.have high modulus,high strength and high toughness,have been widely used in manufacturing fabrics and composites for ballistic protection. These composites have higher impact.damage resistance and light weight,and have great potential in applications to aircrafts,vehicles,ships and civil engineering.Three-dimensional(3-D) orthogonal woven composite is a typical 3-D textile structural composite with the highest in-plane tension modulus and strength.In 3-D orthogonal woven fabric,the warp and weft yarns are interlaced in the form of mutual vertically in the in-plane direction.They provide high in-plane stiffness and strength. The binder yarns which across thickness direction provide structure stability of the fabric.Such integral structure imparts higher fracture toughness and inter-laminar shear strength compared with other 3-D textile composites.Furthermore,the 3-D structure leads to high impact damage tolerance.The main researches conducted are as follows:(1) To weave 3-D orthogonal woven fabrics with glass fiber tows and p-phenylene terephthalamide(PPTA) fiber tows.The 3-D orthogonal woven composites were manufactured with vacuum assisted resin transfer molding(VARTM) technique.The unsaturated polythylene terephthalate(PET) resin was used in composite forming.(2)The ballistic penetration tests had been conducted to obtain,the residual velocities of rigid projectiles.The strike velocity vs.residual velocity curves were calculated for analyzing the energy absorptions.The impact damage morphologies were photographed to reveal the impact damage mechanisms.(3) Based on unit-cell model of the 3-D woven composites and critical damage area(CDA) criteria,a user-defined materials subroutines were compiled to calculate the impact damage evolution on a commercial available finite element software package.These are good agreements between experimental observation and FEM calculation.The results provide the design methodology of the 3-D woven composite in ballistic protection.With the scheme,the high performance ballistic armor could be design effectively.