Detailed Modeling of Projectile Impact on Dyneema Composite Using Dynamic Properties

Abstract

Dyneema composite panels, which contain high Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene fibers, are used in armor applications. They give good protection against fragments, bullets or other projectiles. In order to be able to study the internal processes in such a composite panel, a new modeling approach is developed and is described in this paper. This approach uses a detailed modeling approach that discretises the fibrous phase in Dyneema composite. In the past, continuum approaches and layer discretisation have been used by other researchers to study the processes in Dyneema composite panels and to predict the ballistic strength of these panels. The aforementioned approaches were however not very successful in predicting the ballistic strength, because fiber sliding, fiber failure and delamination of layers were not taken into account and static properties of the material were used. In addition to this, these models were often too coarse to study the processes in the panel. This often resulted in a calculated ballistic strength that was often too low. In this research, fiber sliding, fiber failure and delamination of layers are taken into account in the proposed model together with dynamically determined material properties. It is expected that studying the physical processes in a Dyneema composite panel and a better ballistic strength prediction should be possible using the aforementioned fiber bundle discretisation approach. The modeling of Dyneema composite is done in ABAQUS/Standard for the quasi-static simulations and in ABAQUS/Explicit for the dynamic simulations.