On the role of nose profile in long-rod penetration

Abstract

The superiority of depleted uranium on tungsten-alloy penetrators has recently been assigned to the self-sharpening mechanism, at the tip of the DU rods, due to the adiabatic shear failure which this material experiences. The purpose of the work presented here was to further investigate the role of deformed nose profile on the deep penetrations of long rods into semi-infinite targets. This was achieved through a series of 2-D numerical simulations and several perforation experiments where we recovered and examined the residual penetrators. The simulations were performed for rigid tungsten-alloy rods having five different nose shapes with the density and elastic properties of tungsten alloys. For the normal impact experiments we chose three rod materials: a tungsten alloy, a copper and a titanium alloy. The residual rods (after perforation of finite thickness targets) were imaged by flash X-ray and softly recovered using sand boxes. As expected, the nose shapes of these rods were very different from each other.