Numerical Modeling of Ballistic Penetration of Long Rods into Ceramic/Metal Armors

Penetration into ceramic/armor targets are of prime importance in research as well as industry and military applications. The recent advances in this field shows considerable improvements in the design of armor and civilian technology. Due to complexity of the problem and interdisciplinary of the subject, most of the works in this respect are experimental in nature. The cost of experimentation is high and the results obtained cannot be extrapolated to a large number of cases. However due to the advances of computer simulation, the field of numerical analysis is becoming highly attractive for application and research. Numerical modeling of ballistic impact of long rod penetrators into ceramic armor with semi-infinite backing targets is considered in this paper. An explicit, three-dimensional finite element code LS-DYNA is used in the analysis of the problem. The behavior of ceramic and backing materials are modeled as Elastic-Plastic Hydrodynamic with pressure cutoff and failure strain. The projectile is modeled as Johnson-Cook. Mie-Gruneisen and linear polynomial equation of state are used for materials. The impact velocity range is from 750 to 1350 m/s. The results of investigation are in a very good agreement with experimental data. Keywords: Ballistic impact; Ceramic armor; Finite element model; Long rod; Penetration depth