Hybrid S2/Carbon Epoxy Composite Armours Under Blast Loads

Civil and military structures, such as helicopters, aircrafts, naval ships, tanks or buildings are susceptible to blast loads as terroristic attacks increases, therefore there is the need to design blast resistant structures. During an explosion the peak pressure produced by shock wave is much greater than the static collapse pressure. Metallic structures usually undergo large plastic deformations absorbing blast energy before reaching equilibrium. Due to their high specific properties, fibre-reinforced polymers are being considered for energy absorption applications in blast resistant armours. A deep insight into the relationship between explosion loads, composite architecture and deformation/fracture behaviour will offer the possibility to design structures with significantly enhanced energy absorption and blast resistance performance. This study presents the results of a numerical investigation aimed at understanding the performance of a hybrid composite (glass/carbon fibre) plate subjected to blast loads using commercial LS-DYNA software. In particular, the paper deals with numerical 3D simulations of damages caused by air blast waves generated by C4 charges on two fully clamped rectangular plates made of steel and hybrid (S2/Carbon) composite, respectively. A Multi Materials Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (MMALE) formulation was used to simulate the shock phenomenon. For the steel plates, the Johnson-Cook material model was employed. For the composite plates both in-plane and out-of-plane failure criteria were employed. In particular, a contact tiebreak formulation with a mixed mode failure criteria was employed to simulate delamination failure. As for the steel plates the results showed that excellent correlation with the experimental data for the two blast load conditions in terms of dynamic and residual deflection for two different C4 charges. For the composite plates the numerical results showed that, as expected, a wider delamination damage was observed for the higher blast loads case. Widespread tensile matrix damage was experienced for both blast load cases, while only for 875 g blast load fiber failure damage was observed. This agrees well with the experimental data showing that the composite panel was not able to resist to the 875 g blast load.