Protective performance of shear stiffening gel-modified foam against ballistic impact:Experimental and numerical study

As one of the most widely used personal protective equipment(PPE),body armors play an important role in protecting the human body from the high-velocity impact of bullets or projectiles.The body torso and critical organs of the wear may suffer severe behind-armor blunt trauma(BABT)even though the impactor is stopped by the body armor.A type of novel composite material through incorporating shear stiffening gel(STG)into ethylene-vinyl acetate(EVA)foam is developed and used as buffer layers to reduce BABT.In this paper,the protective performance of body armors composed of fabric bulletproof layers and a buffer layer made of foam material is investigated both experimentally and numerically.The effectiveness of STG-modified EVA in damage relief is verified by ballistic tests.In parallel with the experimental study,numerical simulations are conducted by LS-DYNA®to investigate the dynamic response of each component and capture the key mechanical parameters,which are hardly obtained from field tests.To fully describe the material behavior under the transient impact,the selected constitutive models take the failure and strain rate effect into consideration.A good agreement between the experimental observations and numerical results is achieved to prove the validity of the modelling method.The tests and simulations show that the impact-induced deformation on the human body is significantly reduced by using STG-modified EVA as the buffering material.The improvement of protective performance is attributed to better dynamic properties and more outstanding energy absorption capability of the composite foam.

Impact toughness of a gradient hardened layer of Cr5Mo1V steel treated by laser shock peening

Laser shock peening(LSP) is a widely used surface treatment technique that can effectively improve the fatigue life and impact toughness of metal parts.Cr5Mo1 V steel exhibits a gradient hardened layer after a LSP process.A new method is proposed to estimate the impact toughness that considers the changing mechanical properties in the gradient hardened layer.Assuming a linearly gradient distribution of impact toughness,the parameters controlling the impact toughness of the gradient hardened layer were given.The influence of laser power densities and the number of laser shots on the impact toughness were investigated.The impact toughness of the laser peened layer improves compared with an untreated specimen,and the impact toughness increases with the laser power densities and decreases with the number of laser shots.Through the fracture morphology analysis by a scanning electron microscope,we established that the Cr5Mo1 V steel was fractured by the cleavage fracture mechanism combined with a few dimples.The increase in the impact toughness of the material after LSP is observed because of the decreased dimension and increased fraction of the cleavage fracture in the gradient hardened layer.