Damage development in an armor alumina impacted with ductile metal spheres

The present article describes a coupled experimental/computational study of damage development in confined ceramic tiles impacted by spherical metal projectiles.The principal objective is to calibrate the material parameters in the Deshpande-Evans constitutive model for an armor alumina and assess its utility in predicting trends in damage development with impact velocity.The nature of the damage at the impact site is probed through optical and scanning electron microscopy of cross-sections through the impact site as well as surface profile measurements.Once calibrated, the model is used in finite element simulations and shown to predict reasonably accurately the variation in the size of the comminuted zone beneath the impact site with incident projectile velocity.The numerical simulations also provide new insights into the spatial and temporal evolution of subsurface damage and deformation processes as well as the role of metal face sheets in the these processes.