Obtaining reliable ballistic performance is important to full utilization of ceramic armor tile. One possible way to reduce scatter in ballistic performance is through utilization of a reliable, low-cost, high-speed nondestructive evaluation (NDE) method that could act as a screening tool to select those tiles that could produce poor ballistic performance. Ultrasonic methods utilizing advanced phased array technology would seem to be a possible candidate. As a step towards evaluation of this technology, recent single transducer water-immersion tests have been conducted using both focused and unfocused transducers on a variety of SiC armor materials. These materials had grain sizes from 0.89 um to 5.26 um. These different grain sizes likely impact the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at different frequencies and therefore these tests provide information on which to select the frequencies to use for phased arrays. In addition to these empirical studies, an analytical ultrasonic performance prediction model has been evaluated. This paper will present the ultrasonic methods under study and review results to date.
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