Research on the interacting duration and microscopic characteristics created by high-velocity impact on CFRP/Al HC SP structure

In view of the wide demands of sandwich structure with aluminum honeycomb material as core layer in many important fields such as automobile manufacturing, transportation, aerospace, protection engineering as well as ship, etc. In order to reveal the interacting duration and microscopic characteristics generated by high-velocity impact on Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics/Aluminum honeycomb core sandwich panel (CFRP/Al HC SP), a series of experiments about combined type and split type targets impacted by cylindrical steel projectiles at the velocity of nearly 300m/s have been performed by using one-stage light gas loading system and related velocity measurement systems established by ourselves. The residual velocities and the interacting duration are measured during the process of the projectile piercing through combined type target and each part of the split target, respectively. Meanwhile, the simulations have been conducted under the corresponding experimental conditions, and the microscopic characteristics of the CFRP specimens have also been analyzed by using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results shows that the total interacting duration on the whole combined type structure is 164.5 μs, and duration consumed in the front CFRP panel, Al HC and the rear CFRP panel in combined target are 32.5 μs, 91.7 μs and 40.3 μs, respectively. The damage morphology, residual velocity and interacting duration in each parts of the combined type target obtained by numerical simulation of ABAQUS/Explicit module are basically consistent with the experiments, and the crack, delamination, fracture and drawing wire of carbon fiber filaments have been given by cylindrical solid steel projectile impacting on CFRP panel at the given experimental conditions.