Multi Length-scale Multi-disciplinary Armor Design

Principal Investigator
Mica Grujicic (Clemson U.)

Industry
Mike Qian, Jason Zhu (General Motors)

Government
Bryan Cheeseman (U.S. Army Research Lab., Aberdeen Proving Ground)
Jim Tuten (Protected Vehicles, Inc.)

Student
Guruprasad Arakere (Clemson U.)

Currently new armor systems are developed using mainly one of the following two approaches:

• Highly Empirical Approach: The knowledge of general/typical material properties/performance is used to identify material candidates and their layering sequence and thickness. Armor is fabricated and tested. The results are utilized in an iterative design process to improve the armor, or
• Computer Aided Design Based Approach: Detailed knowledge of experimentally determined material properties and associated material models are used within a series of transient non-linear dynamics computational analyses to design and optimize the armor architecture.

The development of new armor systems is time consuming and costly and requires extensive experimental test programs. In addition, composite-level properties on new (e.g. nano-structure based) materials are not readily available. This program will attempt to speed up the assessment of continuum type material properties for the new materials (e.g. multi-walled carbon nanotube based mats, MWCNTs) in order to allow computational analyses based design of new armor systems.

The objective of the present work is to develop and implement an iterative multi length-scale multi-disciplinary design methodology for the determination of composite-lamina level properties of new materials which are needed in the computational-analyses based design of the multi-functional armor systems optimized for fragmentation resistance, multi-hit capabilities and structural performance.