Numerical Investigation Of Ballistic Response Of Steel/ceramic/Kevlar Composite Armor

The anti-warship weapons blast generally inside cabins when attacking the warship,while a large number of higher velocity fragments with small size are generated in the process of blasting.These fragments should be mainly protected by light armors,and it is significant to design the protective armors with excellent penetration-protection performance in the field of warship protection.The composite armors have drawn great attention due to the wide applying background in armor protection field.After validating the numerically simulation method,the numerical analysis of the ballistic performance of composite armors will help to explore general rules,reveal penetration mechanism and guide the manufacturing process of the composite armors.Compared to metallicmaterials,some lightweight materials,including ceramics and fibre reinforced composites,which possess more excellent ballistic performance,have been deeply investigated.These materials are ideal as protective materials of the composite armors.In order to explore the ballistic performance of different composite armors configurations,four kinds of configurations composed of steel,ceramic and Kevlar composite were designed while the ceramic layers of the armor are designed as two blocked forms.The armor structures are generally subjected to continuous impact of fragments in actual situation.Therefore,LS-DYNA finite element software was used to investigate ballistic response of the steel/ceramic/Kevlar composite armor subjected to the impact of two same steel fragments with the mass of 26g.The interval between two impact was selected to be70μs and the impactvelocity was 1000 m·s^-1.The materials behavior of steel,ceramic and Kevlar were modeled by Johnson-Cook,Johnson-HolmquistⅡand Chang-Chang constitutive models,respectively.The failure mechanism and the influence of geometric parameters on ballistic response were analyzed in detail.The ballistic performance of the composite armor was improved when the steel back plate of the armor was replaced by Kevlar laminates with the same mass.The crack path in the ceramic was blocked by divided the ceramic plate into blocks by steel grille and the damage area of ceramic materials was remarkably reduced.When the thickness of the front steel plate or back Kevlar laminates was increased to a certain range,the ballistic performance of the composite armor improved significantly and this range can be considered as an ideal range of various layers thickness of composite armors.