Deep indentation and terminal ballistics of polycarbonate

•We used deep indentation tests to predict the resistance to penetration of polycarbonate by rigid projectiles.•Strain rate hardening has an insignificant influence on the results, by comparing static and dynamic penetrations into PC.•The effect of pressure hardening is observed and is significant in increasing the resistance during indentation and penetration. The penetration of rigid projectiles in polycarbonate (PC) targets is explored through deep indentation tests with conical-nosed indenters and ballistic penetration results for armor piercing 7.62mm projectiles. We found that the resistance to penetration in both sets of experiments is practically the same, which means that the rate sensitivity of PC does not play a significant role in its resistance to penetration. We account for this observation by including the pressure dependence of the elastic constants and the strength of PC in its constitutive equation, which we implemented in numerical simulations. This pressure-dependent constitutive relation resulted in good agreements between simulation results and experimental data for both penetration depths and residual velocities of armor piercing projectiles impacting PC targets.