Energy absorption characteristic of sandwich shell structure against conical and hemispherical nose projectile

Present study addresses the ballistic performance and energy absorption behaviour of the hemispherical sandwich shell structure having hexagonal honeycomb core against conical and hemispherical nosed projectile. The sandwich shell had two face sheet of radius 100 and 80 mm for outer and inner shells respectively, whereas for the honeycomb core cell thickness 0.05 mm, cell size 3.2 mm and core height 20 mm were considered. Al −1100 H12 was used for both the shell, whereas for the honeycomb core Al − 3003 H18 was employed. The projectiles of diameter 19 mm, length 50.8 mm and mass 52.5 g were hit on the crown of the sandwich shell. The experiments were performed using the pneumatic gun, whereas the ABAQUS/explicit solver was used for numerical simulations. The response of the sandwich shell was studied in terms of ballistic limit, residual velocity, failure modes and energy absorption by the sandwich structure. Numerical study further extended to perform parametric studies to investigate the effect of the face sheet thickness, core cell size and cell wall thickness on the response of the sandwich shell against conical and hemispherical projectile impact. The conical projectile required less energy for perforation as compared to the hemispherical nosed projectile.