Theoretical and test investigation of spherical fragments penetrating carbon fiber composite laminates

With widespread application of carbon fiber composite (CFC) materials in military field, to establish a penetration engineering model of spherical fragments into CFC materials is of great significance to meet needs of weapon equipment protective structure design and target vulnerability studies. Here, test studies were conducted to analyze failure modes and energy dissipation mechanisms of CFC materials under different fragment incident angles and target plate thicknesses. Then, an engineering model was established to calculate ballistic limit velocity and fragment residual velocities. The contrastive verification was performed within wide ranges of fragment and target parameters. Studies showed that under high-speed impact conditions, failure modes of CFC laminates include shear plug failure, fiber tensile fracture, laminate fragmentation and delamination; changes of fragment incident angles have no obvious effect on failure mechanism of laminates; for spherical fragments of different materials and CFC laminates, prediction errors of engineering models of ballistic ultimate velocity and fragment residual velocity are less than 8% and 5%, respectively within target relative thickness range of 0 © 2024 Chinese Vibration Engineering Society. All rights reserved.