Carbon Fiber Textile Composite Solutions for High Speed Armor Piercing Ammunition

Abstract

In this study, considering the following military ammunition of 7.62 × 51 mm AP WC (AP8 type) fired at 930 m/s, following the STANAG 4569 norm [1], a full textile composite solution has been considered to both meet the mass reduction and impact resistant requirements. Among the different existing fibrous reinforcement, preimpregnated fabrics of high resistance carbon yarns, with lower tensile modulus but higher relative elongation value, have been chosen and stacked together to obtain the sufficient number of layers to stop the bullet. In order to choose this number of layers, the initial proposed model of Chocron et al. [2] have been first considered and improved by introducing two main parameters as; a linear model of the fiber elongation value allowing to select the time Tmax, whom elongation is maximum, and the selection of different projectile diameter values, noted Dp. Different configurations of fibrous behavior corresponding to the different Tmax and Dp have been considered to determine the different number of layers of carbon fabrics to stack and cure together per block of 50 fabric layers for industrial production considerations. It has been observed, during the post-mortem analysis, integrity of the hard-steel core of the 7.62 × 51 mm AP WC (AP8 type) ammunition for all the ballistic tests corresponding to a lack of erosion during the impact, avoiding reaching the expected surface mass of 100 kg/m2. However, the impact behavior of this 100% textile composite solution seems to cope with this highly hardness projectile.