Blast and Fragment Protective Sandwich Panel Concepts for Stainless Steel Monohull Designs

摘要

The prevention or mitigation of ship hull damage from underwater explosions (UNDEX) is of vital need for surface combatant Naval ships. This research program sought to devise blast and ballistic protection concepts applicable to the design and fabrication of ship hull structures using AL6XN stainless steel sandwich panel constructions, which met threat and protection levels defined by the Navy. Efforts were undertaken in two phases to design, fabricate, experimentally investigate and analyze the quasi-static and dynamic behavior of sandwich beams and plates for several sandwich core topologies, at different size scales to evaluate their performance in underwater explosion (UNDEX), in air (AIREX), surface (SURFEX) and ballistic test environments. Several periodic cellular sandwich cores were assessed by performing dynamic uni-axial compression tests, stretch-bend type sub-scale (1/12th and 1/5th hill- scale) panel tests, and full- scale ballistic tests. Constitutive models were developed for the down selected core topologies to enable the implementation of more convenient large (ship) scale analyses. Soft response cores such as the prismatic cores and multilayer pyramidal cores were found better suited for water blast loading applications and ship hull blister attachments.