Experimental analyzing the static puncture resistance performance of shear thickening fluid impregnated polypropylene hybrid composite target structures for armour application

Abstract

The challenges of today’s protective material developers' requirements for body armour target structure design, strength, stiffness, and light weight structures have historically come from composite structures having high cost, complex manufacturing, and time-consuming process. Hence, there is a need to identify suitable alternate materials with reliable composites and essential design requirements for high impact armour structures. At present, hybrid composite structures are increasingly utilized in armour structure developments because they offer quick adoption to produce low cost, high impact strength, and a methodology for easy and quick manufacturing process without compromising the performance of traditional composite structures. This experimental analysis reports that the prepared hybrid composite target structures are composed of woven polypropylene fabric impregnated with single, double, and triple layers with a prepared shear thickening fluid (STF) concentration (50 vol% silica dispersed in polyethylene glycol 600 g/mol) used as a core layer in this structure and a neat/silica gel coated aluminum face sheet is used as the skin material. The prepared STF is characterized through rheological analysis exhibits shear thickening behavior reveals that extensively depends on silica particle morphology, volume fraction, and particle size distribution. The prepared hybrid composite target structure test results demonstrate a significant enhancement in tensile strength, modulus, better peel resistance properties, and puncture resistance evaluated in different geometry of projectiles like flat, hemispherical, elliptical, and conical indentor penetration velocity at 500 mm/min have been performed to demonstrate the improvements in the target structure. It enhances the performance layer thickness increases with increasing puncture resistance for all indentors sequently identified and penetration damage of target structures varied with respect to indentor nose head surface area of contacts.