Material properties determining the resistance of ceramics to high velocity penetration

Abstract

The relationships between target material properties and the target strength term in the analytic representation of impact is examined. For ductile materials hardness is closely related to the magnitude of the strength term. It is shown that the key parameters correlating microhardness measurements in ceramics are similar to those for ductile materials. However, the strength terms that have been measured in ballistic tests are much lower than the values that would be predicted on the basis of the indentation measurements. It is found that the penetration resistance depends on the fracture toughness, where the ratio of the measured target strength term to the hardness increases with the fracture toughness of the target.