Study on the Armor-Piercing Damage Characteristics of the Small-Caliber Frangible Armor-Piercing Projectile

Fragile armour-piercing projectile is a new kind of ammunition which is used for multibarrel high-rate of firing small-bore cannon or large-bore scattergun, and also it has the higher damaging effect to close-in light armored vehicle moving objects. In this paper, armor-piercing destruction characteristic of the frangible tungsten alloy armour-piercing projectile has been studied, from the aspect of fragile material characteristic and terminal effects. With the help of tungsten alloy production equipment and technics, some kinds of fragile tungsten alloy materials that having different performance have been designed, added ordinary tungsten alloy, total seven different projectile material have been prepared. By performance experiments of static pulling, static compression and metallographic testing, four kinds of fragile materials that haveing certain difference about performance are selected. That index of main properties includes the density, compression strength, tensile strength, tensile stretch, hardness, ratio of compression strength to tensile strength and so on. Dynamic penetration experiment were carried out to this four kinds of fragile materials, the results of testing showed that the relationships between the static performance of the fragile material and the dynamic penetration destruction performance exist. At the same time, the fragile mechanism of projectile and fragment residual effectiveness is analysed through armour-piercing mechanics theory, and the results of testing through hitting and damaging the targets by means of frangile armour-piercing projectile made by tungsten and simulated projectile showed that the bullet core structure and impact velocity has a definite influence to the damaging effect, but the damaging effect of the fragile bullet is decided by the characteristic and fabrication method of the tungsten alloy brittle material under the premise that the bullet core structure and other factors influence same. These studies provide reference for design of fragile armour-piercing projectile.