Numerical investigation on the impact resistance of ceramic-based composite structure with hybrid architecture

Abstract

As known, ceramics possess desirable strength, hardness and low density, which have been extensively applied in engineering fields. However, the inherent brittleness makes the ceramics present poor toughness and consequently impact resistance as well. In recent decades, some ingenious architectures of biomaterials employed to improve the mechanical properties of brittle bulk materials, such as laminate and brick-mud, have become increasingly popular. Here, in order to further enhance the impact resistance of ceramics, a kind of hybrid ceramic-based composite structure is designed according to the gradient feature in dactyl club of mantis shrimp. The impact resistance performances of bulk, laminate, brick-mud and hybrid structures are investigated by finite element simulation. The results show that the hybrid structure can effectively avoid catastrophic failure, thereby having large scope of deformation area to store energy. Moreover, the damage mass of impactor for the hybrid plate is the largest due to the beginning hard collision between impactor and target plate and long cumulative damaging time of impactor. As a result, with the highest internal energy and eroding kinetic energy of impactor simultaneously, the hybrid structure dissipates the most energy of impactor. Further, under extreme working conditions of oblique and high velocity impact, the hybrid structure still exhibits optical impact resistance performance.