Ballistic impact damages of 3-D angle-interlock woven composites based on high strain rate constitutive equation of fiber tows

This paper reports the ballistic impact damage of three-dimensional angle-interlock woven composite (3DAWC) under a hemispherical rigid projectile penetration on the basis of high strain rate constitutive equations of fiber tows and multi-scale geometrical model of the 3DAWC. The constitutive equations of the Twaron® fiber tows (poly paraphenylene terepthalamide, PPTA) under high strain rates have been established to characterize the mechanical behaviors under impact loading. The Twaron® fiber tows were assumed as transversely isotropic viscoelastic material to derive the constitutive equations. The maximum strain failure criterion was adopted for defining the failure of the PPTA fiber tows. A user-defined subroutine UMAT (FORTRAN user-material subroutine) was written for combining both the constitutive equations and the failure criterion in numerical calculation. Based on a micro-scale geometrical model of the 3DAWC, the UMAT for the PPTA fiber tows was combined with a commercial available finite element method (FEM) software package LS-DYNA to calculate the ballistic impact damage when the 3DAWC panel penetrated under a hemispherical–cylindrical steel projectile. It was found that the FEM simulation agrees well with the experimental results. The impact damage morphologies and damage propagations, the energy absorptions and the stress distributions in the 3DAWC panel were presented to elucidate the ballistic penetration damage mechanisms for optimizing the ballistic protection capacity of the 3-D woven composite material.