Determination of the ballistic performance of a cold-rolled, deep-drawing sheet metal

Abstract

Cold-rolled deep drawing sheet metals are very widely used for building vehicles since they are easy to obtain from the market, can provide necessary strength with a reasonable weight/cost ratio and are also very easy to be manufactured. These materials also can provide enough protection against threat under ballistic speeds. In this study, the ballistic performances of deep drawing sheet metal specs that have a thickness of 1 mm are investigated. The sheet metal specs that are used as targets have a trade mark of 7132, which is known as H320 LA or DIN EN 10268 - 99 for cold forming. The bullets that are used during the ballistic experiments belong to 9x19 mm Parabellum cartridges and contain different amounts of gunpowder. For the perpendicularly impacting bullets, the speed of the impact and also, the speed of the bullets after penetration are measured by a digital bullet speed measurement device set-up, which is specially designed and manufactured for this particular study. While determining the deformation pattern of the targets, diameter of the front face deformation, crater depth and diameter of the hole for the penetration case are defined and depending on the impact speed of the bullet, changes in these quantities are investigated. A finite element model of the ballistic impact scenarios for different impact speeds are also modeled and simulated by using a non-linear explicit finite element code (LS-DYNA). The numerical results are also in good agreement with the experimental values. Copyright © 2005 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.