Hypervelocity penetration of tungsten alloy rods into ceramic tiles: experiments and 2-D simulations

Abstract

A series of terminal ballistics experiments and 2-D simulations, with small scale tungsten alloy penetrators, was performed in order to quantify the ballistic efficiency of confined ceramic tiles. The data includes both depth of penetration (DOP), into thick steel backing and X-ray shadowgraphs during the penetration process. Impact velocities ranged between 1.25 to 3.0 km/s. The size of the tiles varied in order to check their performance as a function of thickness and lateral dimensions. We found that the differential ballistic efficiency of alumina tiles is practically independent on impact velocity and tile thickness, within the ranges of velocity and thicknesses, investigated here. A detailed simulation study, using the Eulerian processor of the PISCES 2-D ELK code, was performed in order to better understand the interaction between long-rods and ceramic tiles, and particularly, to adjust a proper failure criterion to the tiles. We found that a simple version of the Johnson-Holmquist model, with a single parameter, is fairly adequate to account for most of the data. These include: lateral confinement, tile thickness and impact velocity influence on the penetration depth. We used the code to further investigate the influence of lateral dimensions on tile performance.