Ceramic/Titanium Composite Target’s Protective Properties In High-speed Collisions

The ceramic material is widely used in aircraft, helicopters,armored vehicles, tanks, self-propelled guns,soldier landing, helmets,bulletproof shield plate as a kind of high hardness, high toughness and low density of armor materials.It has the excellent ballistic performance(including penetration resistance, impact resistance ability and the ability to resist caving). Compared with the commonly used armor materials such as metals, glass fiber and Kevlar, the elastic resistance of ceramics is obviously higher than that of steel armor.The glass fiber and the Kevlar are only used for the back or non-metallic interlining to show their effectiveness. And because of the high strength,good plasticity and toughness, good high and low temperature resistance and excellent corrosion resistance, the titanium alloy has been used in conventional weapons as a kind of new structural materials.The requirements of armour material are:(1) the projectile can be broken when it shot the armour;(2)the armour can stop the warhead fragments or its penetration;(3) the armour can absorb the energy of the projectile and avoid to be broken with no debris on the back. Therefore it required materials have high hardness and high impact toughness.The single homogeneous material cannot meet the requirements,while the composite combines this two properties well.Ceramic/metal composite target,which combines ductile material and brittle material together, has good resistance to penetration effect.In this paper, the high-speed impact characteristics of ceramic/titanium alloy composite target was studied by the means of experiment, theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. High-speed ballistic gun was used as a kind of loading methods in the penetration experiment to obtain the rules of perforation diameter, penetration depth, target plate perforation damage forms changing with the projectile velocity.Titanium target with the same thickness of ceramic/composite target was set up in high speed penetration experiments to analyse the differences of protective performance between this two targets. Through flow resistance movement theory and the cavity expansion theory,this paper established analysis model of the projectile breakdowning ceramic/metal composite target and projectile penetrating witness target, and derived the theoretical calculation formula of the projectile’residual velocity and the witness target’ penetration depth. Through Auto-Dyn,the projectile impact process of ceramic/titanium alloy composite target and titanium alloy target respectively under different speed was simulated, comparing with experimental condition to verify the reliability of the model. On the basis of dimensional analysis, this paper studied target size’s influence on the residual velocity and projectile velocity’s influence on penetration depth of target by numerical simulation method, and obtained the experience formula.