An Investigation On Penetration Performance Of Lightweight Ceramic Composite Armor For Ship

The protection of the important parts of the ship, including the superstructure of the ship and cabins plays a very important role for the security of the overall ship. Ceramic composite armor has a good ballistic performance, which is widely used in armored vehicles, helicopters and ships. The chose of ceramic composite armor and deeper research of structural optimization is very important for the lightweight design requirement.In recent years, many domestic and foreign scholars have done a lot researches on the ballistic performance of ceramic composite armor, including experimental studies, theoretical studies and numerical simulation studies. However, it is necessary to combine the there methods to study the penetration process of the composite armor system due to its complexity.In this paper,for the purpose of lightweight design of ship,the paper studies the penetration process of the composite armor system which is composed by alumina ceramic and aluminum alloy in detail,and then discussed the optimal design of the ceramic/aluminum composite armor. The paper achieves the best ballistic performance by optimizing the ration of composite armor system:Firstly, the numerical simulation method, which is suitable for the high speed penetration problems,SPH particle method is introduced and compared to the traditional numerical methods based on the grid.Secondly,the SPH algorithm of Ansys/Autodyn software is used to simulate the penetration process of ceramic/aluminum composite armor system in detail and the comparison between the numerical result and experimental result indicates the accuracy of the numerical simulation is very good. The paper discusses the semi-analytical approach for the penetration of the ceramic composite armor by the bullet based on the numerical simulation,and the comparison with the experiment indicates the practicality of the approach.Then, the paper discusses the various optimized design methods of the ceramic composite armor based on the Florence model, including optimization by a given areal density or a given thickness or a given bullet speed. Meanwhile, the numerical method is used to study the ballistic performance of the ceramic composite armor with different thickness ratio, and then analyzes the difference with the theoretical model.Finally, the paper discusses the double constrained optimization problem with a given areal density and a given total thickness. The model is valuable for the engineering design.