Ballistic performance of armour grade heat treated steel using explicit dynamics

Abstract

Impact, damage and penetration modeling of thick-section are of great importance to many industrial, automotive, aerospace and defense applications. Now a day’s simulation has gained wide attention because of its versatility to predict the results with a nearer approximation to obtained experimental values. This investigation deals with combination of composite type of brass based lead core projectile and heat treated tempered armor grade steel to evaluate the ballistic performance using 3D-nonlinear dynamic explicit finite element code AUTODYN. The simulated and experimental results are found to be in the close proximity. Armor grade steels are widely used materials in defense applications especially as outfit of combat vehicle because of their high strength, high hardness, toughness and economical. These steels are extensively used because of their capability to defeat kinetic energy of projectile on its initial impact and successively absorb the residual energy. It has been understood from various literature that the profile of penetrated projectile is composite in nature instead of homogenous one. Thus, the present investigation deals with modeling of both projectile and target using CATIA and modeled entities are imported into the ANSYS workbench. Similar boundary conditions and material properties were assigned based on available in literature to the thickness of target plate which is used in fabrication of armour vehicles. The results obtained are compared with experimental findings as available in open literature and it can be taken to be in the acceptable limits. Hence the developed model can be considered as one of the tools for accessing the ballistic performance to validate the thickness of armour grade steel.