Ballistic performance of a lightweight nacre-inspired armour panel – a numerical study

Abstract

This paper provides a numerical investigation on the ballistic performance of ceramic composite armour panels with porous architectures inspired by nacre from mollusc shells. The development of such armour panels can lead to reduced weight and improve ballistic performance through projectile rotation induced by non-uniform contact stresses. The porous tablets of nacre have the potential to reduce the mass of armour panels without compromising their ballistic performance. Preliminary simulations were conducted to assess the performance of several porous bio-inspired structures that have the potential to survive projectile impact with less mass. Several bio-inspired panels composed of various porous designs were generated based on the different void architectures of nacre's tablets. Their performances were benchmarked against a monolithic panel under the same projectile impact condition and having the same 4.5 mm overall panel thickness but higher mass. It was found that for the cases considered, the biomimetic panels with porous architectures possess better ballistic performance compared to the corresponding monolithic panel by arresting the projectile having an initial impact velocity of 500 m/s, whilst reducing its mass by up to 18%. A further study was conducted on bio-inspired panels with a higher thickness but the same mass as the solid monolithic panel under the same projectile impact condition. It was found that the bio-inspired panel exhibits significantly improved ballistic performance when subjected to a fragment simulating projectile having an initial velocity chosen to be the ballistic limit velocity of the corresponding monolithic panel.