Mr. William A. Gooch. Armor Mechanics Branch,. Terminal Effects Division,. Weapons & Materials Directorate,. Army Research Laboratory. AMSRL-WM-TA.
International Conference on Advanced Ceramics and Glass Pac Rim IV Ceramic Armor Materials by Design Wailea, Maui, Hawaii 4-8 November 2001
AN OVERVIEW OF BALLISTIC TESTING METHODS OF CERAMIC MATERIALS Dr. Michael J. Normandia Annor Mechanics Branch, Terminal Effects Division, Weapons & Materials Directorate, Army Research Laboratory AMSRL-WM-TA Aberdeen Proving Ground APG, MD 21005
Mr. William A. Gooch Armor Mechanics Branch, Terminal Effects Division, Weapons & Materials Directorate, Army Research Laboratory AMSRL-WM-TA Aberdeen Proving Ground APG, MD 21005
ABSTRACT An overview of impact testing techniques used to characterize or evaluate engineering structural ceramics for annor applications is presented. The required brevity of this paper restricts the detail to a listing of the commonly used testing methods, a categorization of ballistic techniques, and an extensive, but far from complete, listing of key references appears in alphabetical order, and we apologize for any omissions. Individual speakers have been invited to this conference, and they will provide greater detail of the testing techniques, the evaluation procedures, and of the annor system design methodologies. In addition, the presentation vuegraphs provide typical testing configurations, typical results, and test objectives. A similar presentation and companion paper on ceramic annors by Gooch also provides information on how this data is typically used to construct armor systems. A categorization of the testing techniques is provided to classify testing methods into those that attempt to characterize a particular ceramic material's properties, those that attempt to evaluate and rank a ceramic material's performance for armor applications, and those techniques that actually evaluate the ceramic in configurations more representative of annor systems. Finally, we discuss some of the difficulties in utilizing these testing techniques for ranking ceramic materials, particularly due to the fairly recent discovery of dwell, which has had profound effects on data evaluation. Dwell describes the behavior of an eroding penetrator prior to penetration and in certain circumstances a penetrator can completely erode on the ceramic surface without penetration.
