NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTS WITH JACKETED PROJECTILES

摘要

A set of numerical experiments was carried out in order to examine the effect of steel jackets on the post-perforation qualities of jacketed tungsten-heavy-alloy (WHA) projectiles against thin, oblique, steel, plate targets. Jacket strength or hardness was varied in order to gauge its effect on overall projectile performance. In addition, jacket thickness was varied within the constraint that the projectile's overall dimensions remain constant. For impacts at 2.2 km/s, the LID 10 projectile overwhelms the target, and a residual projectile emerges behind the plate. With residual length, L_R, as the performance metric, these simulations show that L_R is a maximum in the case for no jacket, at least for the jacket configurations and material combinations studied here. Further, the results show that jacket strength only plays a minor role with respect to residual length and suggest that the decrease in sectional density at the penetration interface is not balanced by jacket strength considerations. However, the simulations do suggest that a relatively thin cladding layer will not detract meaningfully from the projectile's perforation performance. Reductions in L_R correspond to an observed drop in the penetration velocity and a corresponding drop in the instantaneous penetration efficiency, as compared to the unjacketed reference case.