PERFORATION OF AA5083-H116 ALUMINIUM PLATES WITH CONICAL-NOSED STEEL PROJECTILES

摘要

The interest regarding the use of aluminium alloys as lightweight protective structures is today increasing. Even so, the number of investigations giving detailed experimental and computational information on such problems is limited. In this paper, perforation experiments have been performed on AA 5083-H116 aluminium plates with thicknesses varying between 15 and 30 mm impacted by 20 mm diameter, 98 mm long, HRC 53 conical-nose hardened steel projectiles. For all tests, initial and residual velocities of the projectiles were measured and a digital high-speed camera system was used to photograph the penetration and perforation process. Based on these measurements, impact versus residual velocity curves of the target plates were constructed and the ballistic limit velocity of each target was obtained. An analytical perforation model from the open literature is used in calculations, giving excellent agreement with the experimental data. The experimental results are finally compared to similar experiments on steel and concrete targets, and the capacity of the different materials is evaluated in relation to total weight.