Target damage from highly oblique hypervelocity impacts of steel spheres against thin laminated targets

Target hole sizes and geometries were measured for a series of highly oblique hypervelocity impacts of steel spheres against thin laminated targets. The impact velocity was nominally 4.6 km/s for most of the experiments with a few tests conducted at 7.3 km/s. Impact obliquity ranged from 60° to 80° from the normal to the target plane. Projectiles were stainless steel spheres with masses of 222 g, 25 g, and 1 g. Targets were laminated MX-2600 silica phenolic bonded to a 2024-T3 substrate. Target thickness, t, was varied to give thickness to projectile diameter, d, ratios of t/d = 0.6 and 0.3 for each projectile. CTH Eulerian wavecode calculations of selected tests were performed to improve our understanding of the experimental results.