Impact Stress Analysis of Carbon/Epoxy Composite Plate

Abstract

The composite materials are widely used in the manufacturing of the military protection equipments such as body armors, helmets, vehicles body and other engineering applications because of the light weight and the high performance as compared to the metals. With the progress made in the manufacture of arms and ammunition it has become important to develop armors to become lighter and more effective in resisting fire arms and this represents a great challenge to the researchers.In this work finite element ANSYS program is used to analyze the impact stresses of 9mm bullet impact on composite plate using explicit dynamic and autodyne code. The material used in this work is unidirectional carbon fibers and epoxy. The experimental work including manufacturing composite plates made from Carbon/Epoxy with different thicknesses and subjects these plates to impact by 9mm bullets at speed of 371m/s from 5m distance. The numerical results were validated by comparing the bullets residual velocity and the ballistic limit with the results from the experiment work. The results show that the shear and strain are maximum in the front layers while the tensile stress is maximum at the rear layers and the ballistic limit for the Carbon/Epoxy plate with 5mm thickness is 371m/s.