The influence of projectile hardness on ballistic performance

✍ Scribed by Charles E. Anderson Jr; Volker Hohler; James D. Walker; Alois J. Stilp

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 550 KB
• Volume: 22
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0734-743X
• DOI: 10.1016/s0734-743x(98)00069-4

✦ Synopsis

The ballistic performance of 17 penetrator materials, representing 5 distinct steel alloys treated to various hardnesses along with one tungsten alloy, has been investigated. Residual lengths and velocities, as well as the ballistic limit velocities, were determined experimentally for each of the alloy types for length-to-diameter (¸/D) ratio 10 projectiles against "nite-thick armor steel targets. The target thickness normalized by the projectile diameter (¹/D) was 3.55. For some of the projectile types, a harder target, with the same thickness, was also used. It was found that the ballistic limit velocity decreases signi"cantly when the projectile hardness exceeds that of the target. Numerical simulations are used to investigate some of the observed trends. It is shown that the residual projectile length is sensitive to projectile hardness; the numerical simulations reproduce this experimental observation. However, the observed trend in residual velocity as a function of projectile hardness is not reproduced in the numerical simulations unless a material model is invoked. It is assumed that the plastic work per unit volume is approximately a constant, that is, there is a trade o! between strength and ductility. Using this model, the numerical simulations reproduce the experimentally observed trend.