COMPARING NUMERICAL PENETRATION MODELING OF A MONOBLOC PROJECTILE INTO CLASS B ARMOR TO EMPIRICAL RESULTS

摘要

The U.S. Army M79 3 inch monobloc projectile was the most basic Armor-piercing round fielded for the M10 Tank Destroyer in WWII. It's simple geometry and the availability of historical penetration data make it an excellent candidate for comparison of computational models. The M79 projectile impacting Class B armor plates in varying orientations is modeled using the ABAQUS finite element software. Copies of the armor plate were meshed with hexahedral elements in ABAQUS and also with structured tetrahedral elements in Cubit mesh generation software to compare the accuracy of both methods. The calculated limit and impact velocities are compared to the empirical test results previously recorded. The observed results show that the model featuring the hexahedral elements over predicts the ability of the armor plates to arrest the projectiles whereas the structured tetrahedral element model under predicts this. The model accurately replicates empirical results when the there is a significance difference between the striking velocity of the projectile and the semi-empirically derived limit velocity of the plate. At lower velocity differences (under 140 ft/s) the ABAQUS model is far less accurate in matching any comparison metric.