Effects of fabric target shape and size on the V50 ballistic impact response of soft body armor

The effects of target shape and size on the V50 ballistic impact response of non-backed woven aramid fabrics is studied by considering 4-sided, circular, and diamond clamped fabrics with cross-sectional areas varying between 5 cm2 and 525 cm2. The fabric targets show an initial very sharp rise in V50 velocity which then plateaus out with increasing fabric areas. At impact velocities around the V50 velocity for each clamped fabric shape, there is a critical fabric size beyond which the projectile residual kinetic energy shows a sharp jump in magnitude, which continues to grow with increasing fabric sizes. Regardless of fabric size, all impacts show sensitivity to the precise projectile impact location with yarn-based impacts generally resulting in greater energy dissipations than gap-based impacts. Over the range of target sizes considered, the V50 velocities of the circular and diamond clamped fabrics were very similar to each other and higher than the 4-sided clamped fabric targets.