Experimental Investigation On The Ballistic Resistance Of Polymer-aluminum Laminated Plates

Nowadays,the light-weighted armor materials are commonly used and the aluminum alloy is especially popular among them.There are lots of investigation on single aluminum alloy while the composite materials are less.The composite material is a material usually involving two or more materials and expected to own a best performance in some conditions.Some researches show that the performance of composite materials is better than the single material constituted structure.This paper focus on the ballistic resistance and failure mechanism of polymeraluminum laminated plates.Two polymers are selected.The one is polycarbonate(PC),and the another is polymethyl methacrylate(PMMA).The density and strength of these two materials are very close while the damage strain has a big difference.The polymer material effect is studied by choosing these two materials.In addition,the blunt-nosed and ogival-nosed projectiles are launched to impact the different polymer-aluminum laminated plates.The effect of the layer order is also considered by changing the material of impact face plate.For blunt-nosed projectile,the PC involved laminated plates performs better when the PC is placed in the impact face than backed.The reason is that the PC changes the nose shape for the plates of PC in front and the failure mechanism of the aluminum is transformed.For the ogival-nosed projectiles,as the PC cannot change the nose shape,the structure is better when the PC is placed in the back side,which is opposite to blunt-nosed projectiles.When it comes to the brittle PMMA,it performs bad.The PMMA increase the stiffness of the whole structure and reduce the energy absorption of the aluminum by bending when the PMMA is placed in the back side.Therefore,the ballistic resistance of PMMA involved laminated plates is worse than single aluminum alloy without the PMMA.Moreover,it is found that the ballistic resistance of each plates varies from the nose shape,the laminated plates perform better for blunt-nosed projectiles than ogival-nosed.To further investigate the failure mechanism and ballistic resistance of the laminated plates,commercial software Abaqus Explicit is used.Some of the experiments are simulated and analyzed.The results show that the numerical results are well agreed with the experiments,which indicate that the numerical simulation is a good method for investigate in some extent.